There are many many ways in which spending a few more cents would have made it more useful.

The original concept was to use the 20 pin package, which had lots of GPIOs, including SPI.

The 8 pin package was used because the larger pin spacing and small number of pins makes it easier to hand-solder for beginners and kids.

If you want to spend $1 or $2 more there are already any number of ESP32 boards, RP2040, or even the full on 64 MB RAM Linux Milk-V Duo with 64 bit CPU, 1 GHz, and 128 bit vector unit for $3.