Imo, arduino is also mostly a software project nowadays. While they did make a bunch of avr boards that were quite novel and interesting at the time, now they are not as good in terms of both price and performance compared to various arm-based boards.

What keeped arduino alive is a bunch of libs and arduino ide cores for various boards ppl have written over time.

The MicroPython pyboard is a compact electronic circuit board that runs MicroPython on the bare metal, giving you a low-level Python operating system that can be used to control all kinds of electronic projects.

Literally the second paragraph

Yep, I see that now. When I bought my first pyboard theirs was the only one. It's great to see how it spread!

You can run it on pretty much every esp.

I’ve had issues with getting it working on lilygo devices, but had no problem with basic cheap “devkits” from AliExpress.