Oof, I remember doing lots of embedded stuff at university and this rings true.

The compiler we used was built off gcc so it was reasonably good but I remember we had some weird crash one day that I couldn't figure out. Eventually I added some inline assembly to do an absolute jump to the next place that it needed to go and it started working again. I was too inexperienced to know how to dig deeper but presumably the code generator had inserted something weird that was causing a crash.