I've been playing with home automation and I agree. This guy is creating a mini AWS at his place while I am using a small Pi to run my Lua server[1] that takes less than 2MB of RAM and can run even on a microcontroller.... if anything the Pi is totally overkill already, but it's nice to be on GNU/Linux and have access to so many utilities, even a browser.

[1] https://realtimelogic.com/ba/doc/