That's a totally fair objection and one I'm sensitive to as a vocal advocate for moving ES teams away from the custom crap that we've spent the past 40 years do

That's a totally fair objection and one I'm sensitive to as a vocal advocate for moving ES teams away from the custom crap that we've spent the past 40 years doing. I still think the weird limitations you get from "what about embedded" are often just obvious canaries for problems present throughout much of the vast diversity of computing. For example, sampling profilers used to have serious issues on WSL (where perf must still be manually compiled) and WINE. Having instrumentation hooks also makes things like AFL and custom sanitizers possible. The flexibility isn't always reasonable (e.g. don't assume little endian, don't assume 8-bit bytes), but there may be valid use cases that weren't considered at the toolchain/language level.