Y'all must be holding a few dozen data to get so worked up about spending a few hundred in a dedicated Bitcoin PC. I have a HP desktop mini, with a 6th gen i7 (low power T-series), 32 GB of RAM, and NVME SSD. Cost about $500.

Runs Ubuntu, my Bitcoin node, and a bunch of other related things. I'm a Linux noob, and I was able to figure it out.

I think people got carried away with the Blockchain wars meme about "you can run Bitcoin on a pi" and thought that was actually an idea solution.