It’s not that you can’t make a more efficient device without it. Hell, if you wanted to impress people, you can absolutely populate a board with IC’s and traces and build your own logic.
Orrrrr you could spend $45 to get a full GPIO header backed behind a vast online electronics community. Tbh pi’s, arduinos, and other ARM core hobby kits give you a root skillset to base any project on. Once you can get logic through your code, there’e no need to figure out wire logic if you can program based on I/O and software variables. But it -is- a different skillset that you’ll need to learn to use it efficiently.