I fondly remember the time I hired a QT expert onto an embedded app team and on his first project he imported a sort algorithm from std. He found the system got weird and glitchy, and often crashed.

Yeahhh turns out the algorithm he chose needed to make a copy in memory and the thread he was working in only had 2048 bytes of stack, so larger inputs would corrupt the stack allocated to the next thread. I had to explain to him that we had a full second to complete the math before we had to give back our semaphore, so saving a couple milliseconds on the sort was not a priority. Fun times.

There are so many situations where you can't just swap hardware. Robots on an assembly line? Yeah you've gotta use hardware that's gone through safety testing. They're not going to just swap hardware to make things easier. You want to ship an update, you do it in software and under strict testing regiment. Some of that hardware is 20 or 30 years old. Medical. Aeronautics. Aerospace. All of them and more are using older hardware that's often memory limited but can often just sit and process their next step, and they often don't have built in complex hardware features because those add potential failure points.