I completely agree with you, the PI is very popular and a worthy development platform, there are so many things you can accomplish using
a PI and it's only getting better. Honestly, I much prefer using a PI than a windows machine.
For your needs, you want to develop on a windows system then output a standalone package to run on a PI or 'potentially' other platforms.
IMO HTML5 is a perfect fit for this and could remove the headache of cross-compilation.
Have you considered using:
https://www.libsdl.org/
https://www.raylib.com/
with
https://emscripten.org/
You could use
https://love2d.org/ to run LUA programs, you can develop on your windows system then output a 'LOVE' package
which will then run on any system that has LOVE installed.
Curently, I use a PI 4 with AppGameKit TIER2 (C++) and I output using Emscripten.
You could bypass all of this and purchase a PI to develop your project, not a helpful answer I know but could save you time and effort.