To be fair, there are BSPs for cheap chips like Espressif microcontrollers and a myriad of minimal development boards. You don't need to buy a pyboard, and part

To be fair, there are BSPs for cheap chips like Espressif microcontrollers and a myriad of minimal development boards. You don't need to buy a pyboard, and part of the reason those are so expensive is because they help fund the project's continued development. But it definitely does have issues with memory usage. Personally, I hope that it will become more viable as its development continues and RAM densities increase. I love the syntax and ease-of-use, but I don't love needing a $10 chip for a $1 task. Hopefully it'll be usable for non-trivial tasks on a $1 Cortex-M23 chip in a few years. It also really shines in educational environments. I see a lot of promise in the progression from MakeCode (primary school) to MicroPython (middle/high school) to programming "real computers" (high school/college). It's a natural progression, and understanding simple microcontrollers takes a lot of the scary "magic" out of learning about complex application processors. See, for example, the BBC micro:bit (which also has a MicroPython BSP).