Ditto for robotics. 8 PIO units are enough to read and log four quadrature encoders at practically no interrupt cost, so it's possible to build a perfectly performant closed loop controller in something as slow as Micropython.
Some lovely person got a quadrature decoder into 24 instructions, so you can potentially still do something useful on the same PIO block if you only need one or two quadrature encoders.
PIO actually came in handy for me when interfacing with an x-ray sensor which had 12 or 14 bits long UART data frame- not many micros have such a flexibility in their UART peripherals.
Damn TIL, never heard of that. I'll have to try it, thanks!