I think you're missing my point entirely. If your project needs specific hardware, you have to use that specific hardware (the obvious examples of which would be Jetsons or Zynq/Zynq-like or something ASIL-D or something that tightly couples "A"/M/R cores together, or you are stuck using a SoC from Qualcomm for cell connectivity). There are a lot of projects that do fall into that category.

There are also a (much smaller) number of projects that will legitimately see the kind of scale of production that justifies aggressive cost optimization for the compute platform, either in terms of designing their own around a SoC or picking some SBC/SoM that they can get a good deal on, where the significant additional up-front engineering cost is outweighed by the production savings (and where the desire/need to keep a fixed platform means the often limited platform support from the vendor is less restrictive).

But a large number of robotics projects (basically everything in the research sphere) - this one very much included - just need "some computer" for general-purpose use. They are already separating realtime control onto a separate microcontroller board. For these projects, it is almost always committing a "premature pessimization" of picking some weird SBC. You are signing up for worse CPU and GPU performance, stability, and development future for very little reward.