I'd say it was damning documentation, that such a technically capable person (of whatever stripe, not of embedded obviously, but in general) had this experience.

Picking apart any particular decision along the way does not invalidate the points made.

They pointedly did not start with the least likely most obscure possible approach, exactly to avoid "well you ventured into the wilderness and so of course you got bit by a snake and fell off a cliff"

What I mean is new in embedded, not proficient in C, and green enough to jump to conclusions about the whole "embedded ecosystem" from a product targeting casual amateur market.

Things on the systems end facing the hardware are not really harder but different enough to command their own learning curve.