The raspberry pis have been bad value for money for at least 4 or 5 years now unless you're really sensitive to the power draw. Once you add in a case and fan (required if you don't want it to overheat and screw the SD card), the charger, SD card it generally comes in at roughly the same price as more capable intel 1L PC like the Lenovo M920Q (though of course, they aren't new)
Yeah power consumption (and performance per watt) is the main reason I keep buying Raspberry Pi, I haven't find anything similar on that regard, specially for pi zeros
I'm on mobile so can't easily pull up an example part number, but digital signage controllers can often be PoE powered. They're insanely overpriced new from the actual suppliers, but for hobby projects they can normally be sourced relatively easily on ebay. The trick is that many of the ebay sellers don't bother listing the specs, so you need to first search digital sign cintroller/computer on ebay then look up the spec sheet from the model number.
True for base PoE (802.3af, 15.4W), but if you have PoE+ or greater (802.3at, 30W and up) you can start to power more common PCs - I’m running a couple repurposed Chromeboxes from PoE++ adapters.
I really like the ecosystem around them. All of the nice compact hats, the software, the 3D print files. Very googleable which also means easy to get help from an LLM.
