man, i feel completely the opposite. Once I realized there was a world outside of the IoT 'products' with proprietary ecosystems and that I could build my own,

man, i feel completely the opposite. Once I realized there was a world outside of the IoT 'products' with proprietary ecosystems and that I could build my own, I found this whole world that took me back in time to the early days were I was working much closer to the hardware. Writing code in C, soldering i2c peripherals to microcontrolers, etc. And at the same time its given me real world use-cases to learn the new hotness tech like docker, mqtt, and some industrial stuff like node-red.