The overlap might indeed be small outside the hobby space, but I'd like to note that some MCU, e.g. the RP2040 (of Raspberry Pico board) have additional hardwar

The overlap might indeed be small outside the hobby space, but I'd like to note that some MCU, e.g. the RP2040 (of Raspberry Pico board) have additional hardware ("PIO") and support for those (in the form of an assembler) in a MicroPython implementation, which allows for some hard real-time applications with latencies in the sub-us range. So with sufficient hardware support, performance and latency in the language used to program the core might not matter. The PIO's "state-machines" in the RP2040 offer fairly limited functionality, but the principle applies also to more capable hardware like TI's Sitara MCUs and FPGAs with soft-core CPUs.