This is my experience as well. I have a couple PINE64 devices, a Rock64 (Rockchip RK3328) and a RockPro64 (RK3399). And an N150 device.

Both ARM64 devices run headless, make use of GPIO, and have more than enough CPU. In fact, these are stable enough that I run BSDs on them and don't bother with Linux.

The Rock64 runs FreeBSD for SDR applications (e.g. ADS-B receiver). FreeBSD has stable USB support for RTL-SDR devices.

The RockPro64 runs NetBSD with ZFS with a PCIe SSD. NetBSD can handle ARM big.LITTLE well. I run several home lab workloads on this. Fun device.

I also have an N150 device running the latest Debian 13 as my main home lab server for home automation, Docker, MQTT broker, etc.

In short: SBCs are cheap enough that you can choose more than one, each for the right task, including IoT.