ESP-IDF, Arduino IDE is untouchable for serious stuff IMHO.

Yeah agreed, that's why I was wondering! But esp-idf has been great recently. It used to be very patchy and undocumented but I prefer it over everything else now. I'll check the rp2040 docs and try out the dev board I've had for a while, because now I'm wondering if I'm missing something haha

> Arduino IDE is untouchable for serious stuff

Yes, but AFAIK you don't have to use Arduino IDE for Arduino stuff? e.g. there is PlatformIO.

Embassy is next-level in terms of developer experience.

If you must use C, ESP-IDF/Arduino aren't terrible. But you still don't really have a package manager or means to abstract anything, especially across devices.

The cohesion present in Embassy between the HALs, probe-rs, etc. is really amazing.

With Embassy for example, I can run the same async/interrupt-driven I2C driver code on any number of different MCUs across various manufacturers. This holds true for many, many different types of peripherals in the ecosystem. For the unique peripherals, implementation style and interface are extremely consistent and high-quality.

You can use Arduino libs via ESP-IDF. The IDF environment comes with a lot of libraries on its own but it is a development environment first and foremost. The design of IDF is very open and easy to understand throughout the stack. It is very easy to integrate external libraries via CMake as well.