I see a $100 orange pi 5 with 8GB RAM on amazon, the raspberry pi 5 with 8GB is announced to be $80 - let’s see if that works out, the cheapest raspberry pi 4 (8GB) I can find locally are starting only at $95 and not the “annouced” $75(?) 
But while a RK3588(s) based device can offer much more hardware wise compared to a BCM2712 (rpi5) not everything can be utilized (like NPU/TPU) when no software support is given making some benefits only a theoretical ones. 
That’s what I did. Not a Nuc but a used x86 thin client for $50 and another $30 for coral tpu to start the frigate journey 
And while it is a very solid device I got it is still quite power hungry (talking around 10W idle and up to 30W when busy) a RK3588 based device should be around 3.5 times as efficient (hence needing less than 1/3 of the power for the same task!) 
Like the Home Assistant Blue 
and the latest one the Green 
? 
The raspberries were actually never bleeding etch and since the beginning used quite old socs (didn’t they start with old-new stock from broadcom which were designed for cameras?) but as of today the boradcom socs found in the pi’s look like they don’t even try to compete (or par) with rock chip or amlogic socs The usp always was the quite advanced software support compared to other sbc’s - but as time goes on many other soc’s have mainline support and offer better price/performance ratio as well being more efficient. I expect the green got that specific rock chip soc also for that reasons 
Any way we might see a Home Assistant Red 
in the future which might be a more performand device - maybe build on a RK3588(s) - who knows 