I agree with you but I am thinking that your point on bolting training wheels might be more valid than sarcastic.

See getting into full EE is a serious amount of work (I get it, whilst I work on ML stuffs I have spent time in the embedded space; and the web crowd could learn a lot from the embedded folks). I do however wonder how many people would be willing to undertake the effort if they had a toy to hook their interest at the start.

Me, I will happily stay with my FPGA's and verilog, but then I grew up on computers that were meant to be messed with (e.g. the spectrum), in an era where my parents encouraged me to take apart, _understand_ and mend electronics.

Today it feels like this is no longer the case and that bugs me.

Maybe as a toy this fulfills that niche ?