Debian is all over the place in embedded. It's pretty much the de-facto distribution (you see Yocto, Arch, Ubuntu server etc too) for consumer boards. Not sure what the distribution is in private industry, but typically manufacturers provide Debian images at a minimum. This is a problem for embedded systems because you're relying on a company to provide hardware-specific patches. While those are typically kernel patches (and so somewhat distro-agnostic), most people don't want the hassle of compiling their own kernel. That means you're likely going to be using Debian.

From my experience in private industry, almost everybody uses Yocto.

Security and stability, independence from financial interests of an owner.

Arguably rpm/yum is still a kludge compared to dpkg/apt.

It's not, although I would admit that it's painful to learn. I spent my fair share of time learning it, and can now understand what's wrong with my configs in a split second when it doesn't work. Overall it's faster and easier to search with than apt, from my (very small, I admit) experience with apt. The dependancy system works really well, even when messing around with upgrades/downgrades/uninstalls too.

And I admit that a few years ago I would rank apt as much better than yum. Matter of preference / habit I guess.

I agree about Yum as of RHEL7, but dnf/yum4 are actually quite good in my experience.

Could you expand on this or share pointers to any articles/posts on this?