it kinda sucks, but with the constraints it's at least understandable. they wanted an extremely lightweight language with a bytecode VM which could be ported to whatever MCUs in 2015, while also strictly limiting the functionality for battery usage reasons (and, uh, product segmentation/limiting third party access).

These days I'd say "sounds like wasm" but I guess 2015 was a bit before that took off.

There have been enough bytecodes since UNCOL in 1958 to chose from, and embedded is full of them, nothing special about WASM.

Sounds like p-code.