There's a lot of devices that need to run unsupervised, but still have (relatively) beefy hardware and commodity software. Digital signage stations are one example, some customers want a (relatively modern) Webkit/Blink based browser based system so they can deploy React/Angular/etc based applications on it instead of needing to hire people who know Qt Embedded or similar. The overhead doesn't really matter for such applications: The backlight for a 40+ inches large touchscreen will always consume more power than the other components combined, so you can put in an actively cooled 20W dual/quadcore APU just fine, and having a full OS allows running other services on it (SSH/VPN solutions for remote management, e.g.).

(Disclaimer, we've been doing exactly that since 2011. I've been wanting to move to a containerized approach for years, but our customers are happy enough with the current solution that they don't want to fund it. Alas.)