This is the winning answer. For most other applications it's either; "It can do <thing> _slowly_" or "It can do <easy thing> but is overkill".
Many people forget that the Pis have a wealth of peripherals accessible on the GPIO headers.
I suppose those interested in EEPROM programming and IIC, SPI, and UART probably know this though, and probably (like myself) have dedicated devices for that task.
Still, I have about 10-15 Pis from B+ to 4B sitting in drawers, the Pi Zero (2)s are the devices I find the most use for, so I'd love to bring some back into commission but OPs solution isn't it for me; I have powerful hardware with a plethora of storage and redundancy for that.
Once upon a time, with my OG Pi, I had a GSM "HAT" (before they were called that), and wrote a little API in C/C++ that would text me, so when my UPS detected power down/power restored I'd get a text, followed by another with my new IP address (because it wasn't static). I still have the Pi and "HAT" but don't really need the SMS part anymore.
"Overkill" tends to disappear when you consider the cost of your time. You are not penalized for not using all, or even most, of a platform's capability. Silicon is cheap, programmers are expensive.
The pi shines at doing complex tasks that involve physical I/O when the device is manufactured in low unit volumes. e.g., a few years ago, I built a machine to do a proof of concept for a physician. It was based on a Pi 2B solely because he wanted a touchscreen. The entire thing could have been built with an Arduino, but the hardware cost to do it on a Pi was only about $40 more than on an Arduino. That difference was more than an order of magnitude less than I would have had to charge to do the touchscreen software on an arduino.
When I was working for an engineering services company, there many applications that we could have put a Pi or a Pi Compute Module into, even at larger volumes but for one reason or the other the company would suggest a ground-up CPU board design to the customer...
+65535. For me, the killer use case for my Raspberry Pi (even the original one, or just any single-board computer to be honest) is always an emergency chip programmer. When working with embedded systems, from time to time you need to program firmware into a variety of chips - parallel EEPROMs, SPI EEPROMs, I2C EEPROMs, AVR microcontrollers, PIC microcontrollers, STM32 microcontrollers... Traditionally, many tasks require vendor-specific tools. It's incredible frustrating when you want a chip programmed today but don't have the right programmer at hand. Thanks to Raspberry Pi's GPIO, you can get bitbanging software programmers for a large number of chip protocols.
The parallel and serial ports on a PC used to serve the same purpose. But many modern systems don't have them. You can use USB converters, but latency is usually terrible due to USB overhead. The 3.3 V logic on the Raspberry Pi is also easier to use than 5 V TTL level or 12 V RS-232 logic level.
Many people forget that the Pis have a wealth of peripherals accessible on the GPIO headers.
I suppose those interested in EEPROM programming and IIC, SPI, and UART probably know this though, and probably (like myself) have dedicated devices for that task.
Still, I have about 10-15 Pis from B+ to 4B sitting in drawers, the Pi Zero (2)s are the devices I find the most use for, so I'd love to bring some back into commission but OPs solution isn't it for me; I have powerful hardware with a plethora of storage and redundancy for that.
Once upon a time, with my OG Pi, I had a GSM "HAT" (before they were called that), and wrote a little API in C/C++ that would text me, so when my UPS detected power down/power restored I'd get a text, followed by another with my new IP address (because it wasn't static). I still have the Pi and "HAT" but don't really need the SMS part anymore.