Concerning possible solution 1.
So if you still need to access the GPIO pins, then instead of using the node-red-pi-gpio nodes you can use the node-red-pi-gpiod nodes (most likely this will also be the recommended way in the future). As already mentioned in previous comment, these nodes node-red-pi-gpiod require the daemon node-red-pi-gpiod running. There exists already a docker container for this daemon:
- https://hub.docker.com/r/corbosman/pigpiod (for its documentation read [here] - (https://github.com/corbosman/node-red-gpiod) - take care that it is all pretty new and still in development)
Take care that balena is not able to automatically select the correct image for your architecture when using corbosman/pigpiod image (see its tags). So you must force balena to use the linux\arm64 image by specifying it in the tag as follows:
corbosman/pigpiod:latest@sha256:a49cce352408ab87933fff15681e5fa8b665ca99936845f9e44c43b874cfd9a3
(see also How to use a specific image in a docker manifest list?)
FYI same problem is also handled in balena issue: Node-Red running with balena