While I admit that I am a bit envious of the large 4k monitors that my coworkers use, I have managed to make it through life without buying anything larger than a 1440p monitor.
What exactly is the educational advantage (for the demographic that the raspberry pi is supposed to be educating) of the inclusion of 2x 4k ports and does that advantage override the opportunity cost of including the ports?
In other words '1080p ought to be enough for anybody learning how computers work from an SBC.
Raspberry Pi is many things today. The foundation is indeed focused on education, but the company behind it has a much broader focus and sells many (most?) of their devices to commercial customers, where 2x4k outputs might be beneficial, e.g. in digital signage applications.
Honestly, I'm just spitballing here, but it's not like the Raspberry foundation is making its own silicon. They're using what exists. It's probably a simple case of the chipset they chose supporting it, so might as well include it.
They are making their own silicon (see the RP1 at [1]) and obviously have very significant input as to what Broadcom puts into the main SoC, a chip that is primarily now made for RPi needs.
Rp1 doesn’t deal with video, and having two displays is very reasonable for all kinds of things, including display kiosks, points of sale, etc
Even for a robot. They don’t need to be 4k, it I guess that’s just normal these days
I could be wrong, but iirc the HDMI they use and full size HDMI are pin compatible. It's likely they just chose the smaller connector so they can break both out and have a smaller board footprint(as opposed to having a larger board or only providing a connector for one HDMI port)
What exactly is the educational advantage (for the demographic that the raspberry pi is supposed to be educating) of the inclusion of 2x 4k ports and does that advantage override the opportunity cost of including the ports?
In other words '1080p ought to be enough for anybody learning how computers work from an SBC.