When the Raspberry PI Pico was first released, I (to my chagrin) dismissed it as just another embedded arm cortex board - there must be 100's of examples. By the time I've gotten round to checking it out there is now the Pico 2, what has me impressed is the extra stuff you get around the controller. Between SIO (state machines that can access GPIO) and HSTX (hi speed serial transmit) to mention just two, you have fantastic flexibility and power.
My first project has drawn heavily from the excellent example projects, its outputting a HDMI signal (640x400xRGB332) and hosting a USB keyboard, and getting it all working was really quite painless.
Just to be clear the HDMI isn't being "bit banged" while there will probably be some memory bandwidth overhead the actual HSTX is doing most of the work, with the CPU just telling the hardware where to get the next bit of data from as it needs more, I put the HDMI output on the second core (which I suspect is somewhat underutilised!) and basically just forgot about it.
One minor point of contention is that the C SDK uses cmake, I can for sure see why they have done this but automagical scripts that build makefiles literally 1000's of lines long - what could go wrong... and indeed when I had the temerity to move the SDK - this did not go well, I ended up just re-cloning the SDK.
I'm going to take the opportunity to take a deep dive into the data sheet for the RP2350 as I'm sure there's more interesting goodies in there for me to discover.
If you're looking for a powerful microcontroller, you should for sure look into the Pico.