You really think that paying $20 for something more powerfull than a PC1512, which when considering inflation, would cost $1722 in todays money, is really being robbed?!?
Really, what a wonderfull thing that for $20 I can get something more powerful than what I used to play Defenders of the Crown on, and it fits on the pocket.
You can program in scratch, javascript, python and even c++. You can even change firmware to Zephyr RTOS if you want to do some low level stuff.
On top of that you have big ecosystem of extension boards or even robot kit. And tons of open source projects
Zephyr (for me at least) felt quite bloated and abstracted away, probably because they need to support so many different SoCs. Albeit my experience is with the Nordic nRF downstream version of Zephyr.. The use of device-tree plus inconsistencies with the nordic api's certainly didn't help.
My experience with ESP-IDF + freeRTOS has been much more straight forward and felt much more nimble.