I think that is pretty ungenerous. Before ARM, ISAs were not a commodity, and there were only closed, proprietary implementations of them (usually from a single vendor). Arm licensing its IP and actual designs was hugely beneficial for the broader ecosystem and led to their prevalence in the embedded space. The toolchain and software network effect made it a no-brainer to either reach for a completed Arm design, contract a customized one, or build your own.

The arm experiment ran its course though; the power one vendor had in the marketplace started to be abused for the benefit of the IP holder and detriment to others. Now RISC-V is going one step further with a completely open ISA and also completely open designs. This is an excellent development in the nick of time.

I wonder how Apple feels about arm64 and RISC-V now. They could have probably bought ARM at any point but maybe never considered it to avoid anti-monopoly blowback.

Sure, because the jungle of 8, 16 and 32 bit microcontrollers stuck on 1980's mindset was so much better.

Also you can reach out to ESP32 as alternative, plenty of maker projects using them.