This surely could be recreated with off-the-shelf components, no question. It would be a bit of a challenge to stuff another breakout board into the available space, but certainly doable.

But there's a reason for doing the custom board. As my projects get smaller in size, I need to get away from breakout boards. This project was a good fit to come up with sub circuits for different tasks that I can just copy and paste onto a new design, say for a little gaming handheld, or a micro RC car with a much thinner/smaller form factor.

What might be overkill for the current project might be the enabler for the next project. And it let's me iteratively learn new skills.

That said, I might do another version of this with off the shelf parts only for easier reproducibility.