I completely agree. It brings you back to more fundamental aspects of problem solving that sometimes you miss with higher level programming. There are a lot of things I can do on a modern web server with a language like Go that are pretty cool, but not particularly interesting because it's kind of trivial. There are so many resources available to the program, things to fall back on for resilience, plenty of common problems are ironed out into popular libraries, etc.

Trying to automate something truly reliable and consistently with a microcontroller on the other hand can be simultaneously soul crushing and exciting — there are so many edge cases and challenging problems.

Sometimes I'll spend hours trying to figure out how to interface with a single sensor, and while it isn't important or impressive in the scheme of things, I really enjoy it.