i'm pretty fond of rpi5, they are surprisingly fast (don't feel much slower than the average desktop pc), can have NVME storage, and there's lots of good-looking cases available, which tend to be silent or even passively cooled

but rpis do lack ECC RAM which is often recommended for lightning nodes, so i get it that people don't want to use them for big routing nodes 

 Yes, you should not run a big routing node on that.
To be honest, I use my Raspberry as a Bitcoin onchain node and electrum server.