Indeed. In terms of getting a consistent system where you can pull in packages and drivers from different places while still being able to tweak everything in an embedded system, it's the best option out there. Not that it's a great system (bitbake, the meta-build system, is a bit of an arcane horror. If I were to reinvent yocto, I would use something like nix, which bitbake sort-of tries to be like but fails).

I can also mention buildroot [1] which seems to be a lighter, simpler project for this.

[1] https://buildroot.org/

Buildroot is harder to manage in my experience, yocto's layers are pretty killer in terms of seperating your code from vendor code. But yes, it's also an option.

How is it harder? It's a genuine question, not a rethorical one. Never used Yocto, but buildroot allows you to stack multiple filesystem layers on top the one produced by buildroot.