I think that's partly due to market forces and the value produced per developer. A few Webdev's can write software that enables an entire web company in a few months. Due to the poor state of embedded development ecosystem the same is not true in hardware, compounded by the time/effort required to workaround bugs in the hardware plus working in error prone C. Then embedded developers/companies don't share workarounds via open source, so every team must spend time working around already solved issues. Personally, I'm using the ESP32 largely because of the open-source SDK, that didn't require an NDA or some crappy IDE, then I ported Nim to it. But normally it might take 2-3x more embedded devs to create products with comparable profits to similar devs in pure software