Imho the biggest crutch with M5Stack stuff is that for almost every single product there's close to 0 support for ESP-IDF, so you're either stuck with the Arduino framework and their libraries, or you have to se tup everything from the ground up. This does not really matter with simpler products like the M5Atom but it becomes a real pain when you have to deal with e.g. their cores. Also their absolute lack of JTAG support is infuriating, because it forces you to deal only with log-based debugging, which in current year is ridiculous even for embedded systems