I started working with Microcontrollers when 80C51s were still somewhat modern, and I remember how frustrating the toolchain and the general experience was.

When AVR came out with their ATmegas, it was a revelation. Not having to use shitty proprietary programmers and windows-only software was amazing. We could finally use Linux. PIC was one of the main competitors in our circles, but it was losing the foothold quickly, because the AVR tooling was just hands-down better.

Also, documentation was easier to read and interpret, especially compared to PIC, which is still giving me slight PTSD when I try to recall how hard it was to get non-mainstream features to work. Whenever I had to deep-dive PIC documentation I stumbled over weird behaviour or outright hardware bugs that, in some cases, could not even be worked around.

I don't actively work with microcontrollers nowadays, but I am excited to hear that AVR is still making an effort to have an objectively good product. The market is tough nowadays, with ESP32s and ESP8266s being so cheap and widespread, but I hope AVR keeps it up.