There are still some developers who work on microcontrollers and the like.
Also a lot of the embedded world still has MMUs and caches but there's not a whole lot of software between you and hardware.
I have a few problems with that, though. For one, I don't really care about the vast majority of projects that kind of stuff is used for, and for another they often have closed proprietary toolchains.
Yeah, see, that's a hold up for me. If I'm going to go through the effort of building something completely non-commercially viable than I want it to at least be completely open. And before you say anything, no, I'm not at all interested in making anything commercially viable.
Retro platforms were current technology. If I'm going to use technology with several orders of magnitude less power, then I'd at least like it to be open, is all I'm saying.