Still, even the open source FPGA tooling is very far behind the commercial software, and there is a reason for hobbyists to use FPGAs. I really hope it improves eventually.

I'm not very hopeful though. My experience of switching from the software industry to the hardware industry has shown me that most hardware people are just really bad at software and also don't really care about it. (Which is kind of weird because hardware design is really just programming for an unusual target platform.)

The fact that Verilator exists and mostly works is a big outlier.