So FPGA prices have come down to hobbyist levels. Would someone point me toward hobbyist-level resources for programming such a device? Or is toying with machine code simply too tedious for achieving substantial results? My interest in these stems from the potential to hardwire inner-loop procedures that would otherwise have run atop a stack of multi-million LOC abstractions.
Yosys and nextpnr have been production-ready for years, they handle your average hobbyist FPGA project just fine (and 1-2 orders of magnitude faster than the vendor tools).
They were at hobbyist levels 15 years ago when Spartan-3 came out. Then everyone decided that FPGAs had to be premium priced and killed off the affordable parts.
The toolchain is free (not open source) unless you are building very very high performance products. Even in industry we use the free Vivado most of the time. At one point, there was some Synopsys products that groups were using but they lagged in features compared to the vendor tools.
The author includes detailed instruction for how to build a micro-controller in Verilog on an icestick, starting from a very simple blinker all the way to a functional RISC-V core.
My other suggestion would be: for most of the toolchain, skip your package manager and directly install the binary artifacts published on this Github repo:
What do you consider "hobbyist-level resources"? The tools to take you from HDL (Verilog or VHDL) to a bitstream to load into the device are typically free to download.
