Counterpoint:

http://www.atmel.com/Images/45107A-Choosing-a-MCU-Fredriksen...

The 32-bit market was at $6 billion by 2014 per Amtel's report. There's also a huge amount of sales for Windows Embedded and embedded Linux's. That represents a significant chunk of a massive market. So, it's quite worthwhile to call even a 32-bit-targeted, hard-real-time GC useful for "embedded" systems. As he said, it's part of the standard definition used in the embedded sector. The 32-bit side is going up rapidly, too, due to decreasing cost and power usage.

EDIT: The specs on them are also starting to look like the desktops of old. Actually, started to do that quite a while ago.

https://cache.freescale.com/files/32bit/doc/fact_sheet/IMX7S...

The market goes all the way from something like the PIC10 to something ARM v8 64 bit.

It is all a matter of what a company is targeting as customer market, and how much it is willing to spend.

Just because a given language is not able to target 100% of the market, it doesn't make it invalid to such market.

If that was the case, C wouldn't be a valid language for embedded development as well, given that many CPU/uC aren't able to cope with straigh ANSI C compliant compilers and require either a C dialect or pure Assembly.