Nordic seem to have the best understanding of what actually makes life easier for embedded software, which is really nice. Most other vendors seem to have done a lot of work to try and make things 'easy' but don't quite seem to have understood the goal.
I might be misreading your post, but there's nothing stopping you from using a gcc+make+$EDITOR workflow with the Kinetis or MSP430 chips either. I've done both, it's not even painful. (Admittedly I haven't worked with MSP430s in about a decade, maybe the situation has changed, but it seems unlikely.)
This results in a safe, reliable and simple monitoring system.
On a related note, as to microcontroller choices: having done quite a bit of work with MSP430 and various NXP Kinetis chips, I am very, very tired of crappy software engineering practices, monstrous IDEs which are all a reworked version of Eclipse, bad libraries and frameworks which change direction seemingly every month. So I decided to stick with the Nordic Semiconductor chips (mostly nRF52832 and 52840 these days). Yes, they are more expensive per chip. But I don't use hundreds of them, and the savings in my time are huge: their SDKs are nice, you don't have to use their IDEs, you can stick to gcc and Makefiles, and it's overall a decent experience.
In general, while I really like the article series, I don't think the price of a microcontroller matters much in hobby usage. It's very important in commercial designs, but at home where you will never use more than 10 — who cares? It's the overall development experience that matters.