Android development seems to be universally acknowledged as a backwater -experience compared to other platforms.

While it certainly has helped to spread the spectrum of managed languages used across an OS stack, something that Microsoft failed at with Longhorn due to internal politics between DevDiv and WinDev, it has definitly plenty of warts, starting by the expectation to wait for the first set of bug fixes afer each "stable" SDK/IDE release, somehow all the previews, canary and beta are never enough.

I found the Stadia developer experience to be pretty solid. The visual studio integration was top notch and worked, with a few minor exceptions, without a hitch. Having worked with all major gaming platforms to come out in the last two decades, Stadia was certainly not the worst.

Sure, if one wanted to rewrite their engine.

Shortly before Stadia was ramped down, there was a talk about Stadia team starting the Stadia Porting Toolkit, as they weren't getting enough studios interested in porting their XBox/Windows engines into Stadia, versus what they would get out of GeForce Now and Cloud Game Pass.

>stone age development experience

simply not true. Stadia had full integration into MSVS in build and debug flows. Even 'lets show a build to management' flows there were better than Windows (i was in shock myself). And for long time during Covid Stadia builds were the easiest way to get playtests up and running at home.

But I agree with your other point that investing into porting and Vulkan renderers was a huge waste of dev resources.