Embedded Rust has been a viable option for at least 4 years now and especially so for the past 2 years. I really dislike having to learn the quirks of building, configuring and navigating typical embedded c based projects. They always seem to have an excessive amount of tiny files (in various languages) all over the place with obscure heuristics only the original authors know about. IMO, to build anything new your only reasonable option is to blindly copy and paste an example project and hack away. I’ve never been able to “start from scratch”.

An embedded Rust project is the same as a normal Rust project except that you mark it as not linking the standard library !#[no_std] and you define a main entry point and panic behaviour (there are helper crates for this).

You can still use the core and alloc crates which give you pretty much everything you need in an embedded system like strings and vectors. You also get to use modern tooling like vs code and rust-analyser instead of a different antiquated version of Eclipse for each hardware vendor.

I don’t think that Rust should only be used for big projects. You can use it for small projects and you really don’t need to get complicated with generics for application code. You need to put in the effort to get a fundamental understanding about what the borrow checker is trying to achieve and the rest may be easier than you think.