I'm using the StarFive VisionFive 2 and its working quite well, there are debain and ubuntu images available as well as some other distributions, generally most of the boards features are working fine and there is a community around it actively improving software support.
For your requirements it might be a bit overkill in performance as its more in the neighborhood of a RasperryPi 3/4 in terms of size, power consumption and performance.
Scala quicky got my favourite language. I really like handling data using functional and imutable concepts.
Great libraries for db access (slick) and json handling (sparay-json) were not mentioned in the article, I wonder why slick is not even mentioned in the comments, it is really nice!
Using scala with these and combined with akka and futures feels like a so natural way of programming for me.
I generally love Telegram, but what bothers me is that they don't end-to-end encrypt my messages. Sure they do in the "private"-mode but this is not really usable to me, as there is no desktop client and my messages are often not arriving as reliable as the normal ones...
For your requirements it might be a bit overkill in performance as its more in the neighborhood of a RasperryPi 3/4 in terms of size, power consumption and performance.