Last time I used Arduino was probably the late 2000s, as a kid/teenager,student their prices always felt too high to me, so I moved to "compatibles" or "clones" for a while.
Once ESP8266 and ESP32 came along (with a detour thanks to Raspberry Pi coming along in the 2010s), there was really no need nor desire to use Arduino anymore and like you I forget about them.
Maybe they have a place in education, and maybe in industrial applications, but outside of that, I wouldn't even consider Arduino anymore.
PlatformIO by the way is excellent, and I've used it for all ESP8266/ESP32 development in VSCode for some time now, though increasingly I just use ESPHome, as my desire to program microcontrollers at a low level wanes and my desire to simply achieve the task quickly grows.
I also really appreciate how routine ESPHome has made building sensor networks in my home. Really just incredibly useful software.
As a hacker and tinkerer I hate ESPHome. Yes it's super cool to have a turnkey "I want these sensors, give me firmware" but all of the code is hidden away and you can't easily modify or add to it.
If I want to run custom logic, I have to bundle a custom component into the esphome thing. Not bad I guess but I still don't like the lack of control
You can definitely override existing and create custom C++ components in ESPHome without too much hassle. It allows lambdas in the YAML itself.
my custom logic runs as something in home assistant usually, haven’t yet had a need to add stuff in the esphome config yet (although I could imagine many situations where it’s necessary)
Yeah, for sure. My more... uhh.. creative toys are definitely not ESPhome, but it's super cool that I can solder on a few wires to a DHT-11 and throw it in a closet with the weakest USB power plug I own, and end up with a great sensor.