Well put. This is a natural, expected and in many ways welcomed development in the cycle, but it’s not so much ‘embedded’ (in the sense you and I think of it) as ‘processors in this range are now computers, not microcontrollers.’
An ESP32 (and oh man they’re great) is more powerful than a mid-late 90s desktop, but power isn’t what separates a computer from a microcontroller. It’s the abstraction compared to the bare metal control.
(To be clear, the project in the post is very much embedded, but programs running on a vm written in a high level interpreted(ish) language are not so much.)
embedded is a term that means your code is closer to the discrete component analogy as possible, with all the same design and testing expected from the electrical design.
If you want to add modern language niceties to it, fine, But I would say that anything that brings in the "app" concept, and specially installation and fleet management, the better term is microcontrollers.
An ESP32 (and oh man they’re great) is more powerful than a mid-late 90s desktop, but power isn’t what separates a computer from a microcontroller. It’s the abstraction compared to the bare metal control.
(To be clear, the project in the post is very much embedded, but programs running on a vm written in a high level interpreted(ish) language are not so much.)