What he did "cost me about $25 for the USB Dongle and roughly 30 minutes of time". How long would you estimate it would take a person unfamiliar with hardware to build the setup you had in mind?
I wanted a medication reminder with a blinking light for my partner so that it would come on at the right time and turn off when she took the meds. Could I have done it in pure hardware? Sure. But I bought a Raspberry Pi and we wrote the code together in Ruby because that was faster an easier. It in some sense was an egregious waste of computational capacity, and the parts cost could have been way lower. But it was also 50 bucks and it was using stuff we already knew. Even if I valued my time at minimum wage, "overdesign" was the optimal choice. And I definitely charge clients more than minimum wage.
Your serious claim is that a hardware novice can go from ordering parts on aliexpress to a finished, working system 10 minutes after opening the box? That seems implausible. I expect a novice would spend way more than that just trying to work out which pin is which and what they were for. That's what happened when we built the medication reminder box, and I have at least a little rusty electronics experience.
But fine, if you're going to claim that, please lay out the exact steps they'd take in that 10 minutes and how long each one will take.
I don't think OP's goal was to get this done in the most efficient way possible, but rather to solve a problem using the tools that they were already familiar with and have access to.
At first I thought it was a parody about overdesign and CV-driven development.
You can make a turkey edible by just salting the whole thing. Or you could bury it under a pile of hot rocks (2 euros on aliexpress) if you really need to get heat involved.
This kind of feedback loop can be done in hardware without even an IC. Or an 8266 microcontroller (2 euros on aliexpress) if you really need WiFi.