I wouldn't say it's always ego flexing per se. For instance there are still tons of embedded engineers who won't touch C++ because they think it has some sort o

I wouldn't say it's always ego flexing per se. For instance there are still tons of embedded engineers who won't touch C++ because they think it has some sort of overhead over C, even when C++ wins out in terms of binary size, execution speed, etc. So I'd say there's plenty of ignorance going on as well. To be fair, as other commenters have pointed out, Arduino isn't always a good solution. This is the same in all of engineering though. At work we tend to use Arduinos for production tooling a lot. Our main product is decidedly not an Arduino though. We have lots of constraints though, from form factor to battery life.