Writing traditional MCU software without an RTOS always sucked for a multitude of reasons. Vendor lockin, expensive specialty compilers, and so on

Arduino showed that it could be done differently with some not too expensive abstractions. Sure it is looked down on by traditional embedded engineers but the productivity gains and accessibility was hard to argue against

ESP didn't (only) grow huge because the hardware was cheap and available. The integration in the Arduino ecosystem was done brilliantly. It truly felt like a natural citizen in between usual Arduino code

It will be interesting to see how they make this arrangement approachable for Arduino’s audience which generally expects ease of use to be a high priority.

Am asking because an OSS project asked me the same thing when I mentioned possibly using an Arduino platform for something related to their project.