Hardware

Well, if you use it mostly for GPIO, you don't really need any of that. At the same time though you likely don't need a Pi 5 (or likely even Pi 4) to begin with as any Pi will do GPIO without problems.

That said the cooling requirements are often quite overstated - outside of niche uses where you actually run at full throttle for sustained periods of time, you don't really need to care about it. Sure, it will throttle if you run stress-ng for more than few minutes, but so what? If your workload hammers the Pi at 100% of all cores for long time, you are using wrong platform to begin with.