Beaglebones were popular for a while for GPU farms for crypto, and the shortages were way worse than raspi. I fried one in a PhD project and had to spend a few hundred dollars to get a new one. I used to swear by beaglebones, and they had some nice features, like one usb cable to provide power, expose a serial console, and bridge your internet connection to the board. And one killer feature: 2 independent microcontroller cores that can access the main CPU's memory directly. You could use them to bitbang almost anything. Over time though, most of the newer beaglebones focused on one specific feature and used several different form factors, and most lost the features I loved. BeagleV fire looks interesting but it's missing wifi.
Back in the day (like 12+ years ago) I used some intel SBCs with GPIO, i2c etc. At that time they were nice because they just worked with your favorite linux distribution and put your binaries on it. At the time it was painful to setup an environment for cross-compilation. Today that's easy.
Raspberry Pis are never the best SBC available, and have some very closed aspects but they are usually available, have good community and corporate support and are supported for a long time. I've bought a lot of the other SBCs out there and after a couple of years you find that you're almost the only user left, and the vendor has 30 new products and don't support yours. Then one day you're trying to update your linux kernel for feature y but it breaks feature x, and searching for help yields workarounds and patches, or even OS images for the same issue... for rasberry pi. After a few times, you learn to stick to raspi, or maybe Jetson if you need more.
Back in the day (like 12+ years ago) I used some intel SBCs with GPIO, i2c etc. At that time they were nice because they just worked with your favorite linux distribution and put your binaries on it. At the time it was painful to setup an environment for cross-compilation. Today that's easy.
Raspberry Pis are never the best SBC available, and have some very closed aspects but they are usually available, have good community and corporate support and are supported for a long time. I've bought a lot of the other SBCs out there and after a couple of years you find that you're almost the only user left, and the vendor has 30 new products and don't support yours. Then one day you're trying to update your linux kernel for feature y but it breaks feature x, and searching for help yields workarounds and patches, or even OS images for the same issue... for rasberry pi. After a few times, you learn to stick to raspi, or maybe Jetson if you need more.