I was young and am a mere hardware and server nerd at heart so I wound up down the cloud / DevOps / SRE or whatnot path unfortunately a little too early and it's been quite fun.

Embedded has been consolidated into a bunch of huge multinationals like Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, etc. and they're doing alright financially. It's just a very innovation-lacking industry compared to software, so you have a chicken-egg problem with investors. It'd be like trying to start a CPU company now when we've got Intel, AMD, IBM, and maybe one or two more boutique makers teetering on the edge of bankruptcy constantly.