No need for the wifi and bt dongles anymore, are they are integrated in the Zero 2 W. You can connect keyboard and mouse either via bt or via a single usb otg dongle to connect a wireless keyboard/mouse set or a keyboard with integrated usb hub. In my opinion this is superior to the original B. And far superior to the original A anyway, while still being cheaper. Remember even the original B had just two USB ports, so in practice you needed an extra hub almost always, because of missing functionality that is now integrated.
It depends on the use case. I have several I put around the house with sensors for IoT stuff. ESP32/8266 (and newer) devices would probably be less expensive since they don't need an SD card but are more work to program. The Zero has a full OS with dev tools built in. But for running a desktop, they're not so good.
They're not as cheap any more at $15US for the Zero W. I miss the days when Microcenter had them on sale for $3.14US on Pi day. They did recently have them priced at $10 to celebrate the grand opening of a new store.
The Pi Zero 1 performance is pretty bad and it doesn't support 64bit OSes (so no Ubuntu). The Pi Zero 2 looks pretty decent for the price, performance should be ok-ish and it'll run Ubuntu... if you could actually get one.
