None of the "better" other products have even halfway passing software support. The developers release 1 old kernel with tons of bugs that boots on the board, and that's it.
This is the killer aspect of the RPi, that there are tons of well supported drop-in software solutions for it. Other boards can be made to work, but the RPi will just work.
The Todd Howard bar.
Yeah, frankly for a hacker or enthusiast this is probably not an issue, but if you're looking for something like PiHole or a small emulation box then the fact that the Pi is "standard" and has standard drop-in solutions is worth a non-trivial amount of money, even if the hardware is not as good as competitors.
I have a khadas. Use it for development. Not had any issues at all. It’s not laggy in ubuntu compared to pi4… more expensive tho but worth it.