Arduino has its place for self-taught hobbyists. For a lot of projects, a simple code is more than enough, so there is no point of going into the more advanced mcu like esp32 or stm32.

You are not wrong. Took a trip down that path for a friend, helping him create some items, which was frustratingly limited.

It is, however, super easy if you don't want/need much.

I hate to see options disappear, even if we have other reasonable options available.

I was always surprised why the TI line of MSP430s didn't take better. Guess their marketing was bullshit 🤷.

All the open hardware and software and ecosystem was pretty cool. It was cool you could just buy hats, or whatever they're called, to add functionality, rather than designing a custom PCB and spending hundreds of dollars to get a few boards made and populated. I'm not a fan of their software stack or their choice of uC's, but they did make it easy to just kind of plug stuff together in hardware and software.