It's unfortunate that people don't include nuance in their discussions. These "do" or "don't" type articles make broad generalizations, sometimes as arguments in favor of their position.
For instance, using SD cards for storage is problematic for certain uses, but that doesn't include the popular practices of using a small USB-attached SSD, nor of logging to RAM, nor of logging / writing to NFS. That by itself is just a factor, not a reason.
Likewise, price and availability make the assumption that we're talking about Raspberry Pis, which we know have gone commercial and are way too expensive and hard to get. There are many, many other kinds of Pis like Orange, Nano, Rock, et cetera.
There are plenty of other factors which are good or bad, depending on your situation, like power supplies - a single NUC power supply brick can be HUGE, but a single IKEA USB power adapter can power several USB devices - so it depends on your use case.
These are nitpicks, but what really irks me is when people make comments like this:
..."don’t have to put up with the quirks of Raspian or running an alternative distro that has zero community"
That's dismissive, reductive, and a rather shitty take. Perhaps this author shouldn't be running Linux at all because of all the quirks in each distro. Perhaps they should run Windows. Oh, wait! Windows has even more quirks, and arguably a community so large and disparate that I'd consider it worse than any community of any OS project with "zero community".
Oh, well. My take is that Pis of all sorts are wonderful little devices that have an assortment of advantages and shortfalls for many, many use cases, and you can learn lots using those advantages and overcoming those shortfalls, if you want. That last part - "if you want" - means more than anything. It's personal, and others shouldn't tell you what you should or shouldn't want.