The statement about enabling lower-skilled employers to be hired is pretty much false. Embedded development payed significantly less than most places that uses Java today (at least in Norway), and there's really no difference in the skill of the people I work with.
There's a _significant_ difference in the problem being solved though. The project I'm working at now is, code-wise, bigger by an order of magnitude. As is the problem domain (ticket-selling services, vs firmware of payment terminal in old job).
When doing embedded, I never had to care about racing conditions in threads or across several microservices. The embedded device was single-core anyways, and only talked to one server.
Dealing with memory has been replaced by handling concurrency. Of those I'd argue that the latter is significantly harder than the first. But both add to development time, as it becomes a core point in most design discussions.
In our case, we truly do not need to care about memory. If we run out of it, we either upgrade the instance or add another instance. The monthly hardware cost is lower than the hourly cost of a developer, anyways. Having one less thing to worry about decreases developer time, as there's one less thing to include in our designs, and one less thing to worry about going wrong.
And frankly, you are not getting ahead with your arbitrary gatekeeping on “who is a real programmer”.
That is the advertising claim, not substantiated.
A more plausible explanation for "the majority ... in managed languages" is: it enables employing lower-skilled, thus more easily obtained, labor. It doesn't so much matter how fast development is. Such practices commonly split a simple job among five or more people (a "team") who, collectively, probably cost more than one more-skilled employee who could do it all in much less time, but who is hard to attract to do it at all, and anyway better used elsewhere.