Oh, believe me, it's boring as hell. It's just endless hours of making sense of incomplete hardware manuals, converting tables to code by hand and handling subtle hardware differences. And what I did was console game modding - something that did look exciting at the time. IDA itself must be even worse, seeing how its codebase is two decades old by now.

As for the modern dev experience, what else do you expect? FOSS starved small software vendors by raising the bar for commercial software, so Microsoft has barely any competition in their field. Sure, there's JetBrains software, but that's it?