it is kind of annoying how much effort you have to put in to escape the whole mess
but 90% of what I can do could be done on a 2006 machine with 2006-era software and not deal with the issues of the modern world
which is a little annoying for the concept of making your own platform since that's still a bit further than what you would get with your own microcontroller based system, even if you were using a fairly modern and fast one (shit, if the Pi Pico could reasonably interface with more RAM, it would just be a useful platform for general purpose computing, and it doesn't even need to be much more RAM, even as little as 8MB or so would work for most non-web browsing, non-video tasks)
the sheer bloat of the modern technology stack has nothing to do with how much memory all the shit you want to do actually needs