If you want something that can do some dumb buttons and lights handling on a mass consumer device, it's not ideal.

I would say it is still underrated.

PIO combined with DMA and the independent bus SRAM banks allow for immense combinations of capability.

If you want to do something digital and specific beyond a few MHz the the RP2350 raised the ceiling of what you can do before requiring hardware or FPGA.

It still has some areas where it could be improved, but most of thise would not have been apparent until you really stretched the design.

Having extra PIO GPIO without physical pins but the ability to configure connecting pairs together in software would add a lot of capability.

Perhaps an interesting test/benchmark would be to get a microcontroller to pretend to be an SRAM (or better yet two independently accessed SRAMs) while outputting the lyrics to still alive on a serial link.

The virtual SRAM performance characteristics of timing tolerances and latency would be a respectable approximation for arbitrary digital signal handling that any particular MCU might be able to manage.