Sure but it's definitely moving that way in my experience. As the price difference becomes more and more negligible people prefer to stick more fully featured chips in products where it wouldn't have made sense 10 years ago.

There's benefit for companies to do that too, developers who can work efficiently on an MMU-less bare metal/small RTOS system tend to be experienced and cost a lot. Now if you run Linux (or maybe even android these days) on your embedded product you can basically have any half competent junior coder develop on it without problem.

At the rate this is going I would only be half surprised if my electricity meter ran Linux in a decade, especially since the trend is into making "smarter" ones.

Also while Cortex-M are definitely more microcontroller-ish than the A versions they're still pretty impressive beasts compared to the microcontrollers of yore. They can run at frequencies on the order of hundreds of MHz, often come with advanced IPs like USB, ethernet, DMA and more. Maybe we should have an intermediate category for "millicontrollers".

(As someone who has been in smart-metering for the past 6-ish years, and been s/w architect for both elec and gas smart meters, the situation is that the residential meters (i.e. high unit count) demands the cheapest and smallest processor that the s/w will run on. Industrial meters OTOH, are relatively high-cost and can justify a Linux-based device (and indeed there are examples out there that have gone this way). Tho due to commonality with the residential meters, it is more efficient for them to be based on the same hardware generally.

There are commercial Java and Oberon compiler variants for Cortex-M level systems, though.

True, but with practically zero customers.

Astrobe is operating since 1997.

MicroEJ is operating since 2004.

If they had practically zero customers, they would have closed doors by now.