Hacking on that level is very different from building and upgrading PCs, being able to mix and match components from a wide range of different manufacturers. You won’t or can’t build a serious NAS, Proxmox homelab, gaming PC, workstation, or GPU/compute farm from Raspberry Pis or FPGAs.
We are really lucky that such a diverse and interoperable hardware platform like the PC exists. We should not discount it, and instead appreciate how important it is, and how unlikely for such a varied and high-performance platform to emerge again, should the PC platform die.
Today sure. If you want to custom make "serious" system then x86 is likely your best bet. But this isn't about today, you can have that system right now if you want, it's still there, so this is about the future.
All the use cases, except gaming PC, have "less serious" solutions in Linux/ARM and Linux/RISCV today, where I would argue there is more interoperability and diversity. Those solutions get better and closer to "serious" x86 solutions every day.
Will they be roughly equivalent in price/performance in 5 years... only time will tell but I suspect x86 PC is the old way and it's on it's way out.
We are really lucky that such a diverse and interoperable hardware platform like the PC exists. We should not discount it, and instead appreciate how important it is, and how unlikely for such a varied and high-performance platform to emerge again, should the PC platform die.