When 'Close to the Hardware' Isn't Close Enough

I recently bought myself an STM32 Nucleo microcontroller board to play around with. What fascinated me was how much more flexible things are at this level, how much more you can do yourself. With an ESP32 that's not really the case, you're always tied to ESP-IDF or some other framework. I started with a first simple example, the kind everyone knows and has done before: the famous Hello World. It's simple, and that's exactly why it's useful. You don't learn a language's syntax with it, it's too...