I had to LOL, this is so true. For one project I've spent considerable time trying to get the Azure IoT SDK going on a low-cost Wifi chipset, only to find out

I had to LOL, this is so true. For one project I've spent considerable time trying to get the Azure IoT SDK going on a low-cost Wifi chipset, only to find out that it ended up not working after all the platform glue was in place because of inexplicable decisions from both the host APIs (no source code access, of course) and the Azure SDK, making most of the built-in functionality (eg https/MQTT/encryption) useless for Azure, resulting in not only code bloat, but also running out of heap memory with fantastic silent crashes. After spending weeks on trying to fit everything into ROM in the first place. The end-result was ditching the SDK and re-implenting most of MQTT and websockets before the project was ultimately canned for other reasons. A pi zero w, otoh, costs about $20 (with a reasonable SD card) vs $5 for something like the ESP32, and makes life easier with unlimited storage and open source platform code, but it is impossible to mass-produce anything for under about $120 retail cost due to the high price of the rpi alone, which is a real bummer in a competitive IoT market.