I spent more than a decade building embedded C/C++, never felt the need for any of that. But I was always able to keep things under my control; that is a GCC-ba

I spent more than a decade building embedded C/C++, never felt the need for any of that. But I was always able to keep things under my control; that is a GCC-based cross-compilation toolchain, my own makefiles do build stuff, and an editor I understand inside and out. When you are forced to use a proprietary IDE/SDK/compiler ball of mud, certainly that's a different story. I'd say if one has the sort of problems TFA says it addresses, then go for their solution. But if one does not see any problem a priori, then they should go for the simplest thing that could possibly work. One can always reconsider things later; but if one goes for that more sophisticated solution first, and then realize that it was actually not need, they've wasted their time - and perhaps introduced problems that would never had happened without. Don't be fooled by "modern" anything - too often it introduces new problems while solving old problems. "Stone age" can also mean battle-tested and rock-solid solutions.