Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree. It's clear since COVID that Pi it's barely a company for makers or DIYers anymore, but it's a supply company for small to medium industries to integrate cheap PCs in their manufacturing process and they are good at that role.
Huh. I had a work project a decade ago where we were evaluating SBCs as drivers for kiosks. At that time, the prevailing wisdom was that the Pi was specifically not for industry, as its main advantage was the strong community to provide support for DIYers. Competitors like PINE64 and Orange Pi were the same/better specs at half the price.
The Raspberry Pi and Arduino platforms weren't meant to power commercial-grade products, nor be cost effective at scale compared to raw/custom ARM and AVR devices. However, they've become ubiquitous in education, which I imagine has impacted industry. Similar to how software companies give out free student licenses so that upcoming engineers become familiar with their software for when they start working, an entire generation of embedded systems engineers were taught on official (or compatible) Arduino and Raspberry Pi devices. While these platforms aren't meant for commercial products, I imagine engineers in industry might use these platforms to prototype or work with subcomponents, before they integrate it with a raw/custom AVR or ARM platform. After all, when prototyping, it's easier and faster to get up and running when you have a massive collection of libraries and tutorials online to use, which RPi and Arduino offer, versus doing it all yourself with raw AVR and ARM.