I might have agreed 10 to 15 years ago when arduino was brand new and almost everything was custom.
These days... eh - pretty hard disagree with everything you've said.
Do some folks still need to know the ins & outs of the device? Sure. Will this work on every device? Nope.
Does that matter for the success of this project? Not a fucking bit.
Honestly - this looks a lot like Electron in my opinion: It gives companies a very cheap entry point into a whole realm of tooling that was previously out of bounds.
They can do it without having to hire new folks, they can prototype and run with it as far as they'd like, and then 3 years in, once the product is real and they know they have a market - they can turn around and pay someone to optimize the embedded devices for cost/power/performance/other.
The flow isn't catch-22 AT ALL. The flow is: I'm trying to do a thing that's only marginally related to the embedded device, and it's nifty that I can do that with low entry costs (both financial and knowledge).
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By the time you are under NDA for a new device... you are established enough to be making your own decisions around tooling (basically - you are part of phase 2: optimize).
