This seems like a very weak argument.
IMO (just based on the specs; haven't actually used it), the main reason to use this is for the PIO stuff. That's a very niche use case though.
This is like the iPhone strategy against Nokia. When I worked at Nokia it produced many variant phones - each with a little more ram or a bit less or a better screen or a different chipset. This was because they thought that people bought on price and wanted to have a product at every price point.
The builds took more than a week to finish, the bug fixing was horrendous. The software sometimes had to work with not enough RAM sometimes with different chipset bugs, different graphics limitations. It was a nightmare to produce a quality product. Then out of e.g. 18 phone models we had to customise each one for 1000 operators in the world which intensified the pain and effort.
At that time Apple had one iPhone. It was over specified - lots of RAM, great graphics etc. They only had to test their code once - not 18 times.
PIO is interesting but I'm not fully convinced they're better than a suite of dedicated timers, especially in the realm of power-efficiency.
The _real_ wtf?!?!? spec here is 264kB of SRAM. At this price point / power-consumption, that's a _LOT_ of SRAM. Any application that needs a ton of SRAM (ex: 300 x 200 pixel 8-bit LCD screen) will find good use in the RP2040.
A lot of the other parts of the RP2040 are quite lackluster. PIO is "interesting" but seem somewhat overhyped to me.
PIO has its use cases.