alt Hacker NewsI would argue that even if you need "a cheap SBC with GPIOs", at this point you'd be better served by connecting a tiny $5 microcontroller-powered board with a USB PHY + its own GPIO headers, to any cheap "computer" (i.e. a GPIO-less SBC, or an old laptop, or a phone like in the article, etc.) over USB; where the MCU board essentially serves the host a "GPIO gadget."
You can make such a dongle yourself from ~any MCU dev board, but there are also productized "USB GPIO breakout" adapter boards, e.g. the Adafruit MCP2221A.
The "Pi as an SBC with GPIOs" case now only makes sense if you really, really require the Pi's compactness and/or monolithic-ness (as might be the case for e.g. ruggedized embedded systems like robots.)
I always thought the value-prop of a Pi was the monolithic nature. If you needed GPIO and Linux, you didn't have to glue two things together to make a solution, you could just buy one device that met the requirements.