I completely agree. I spent lots of time trying to figure out their modern SDK, but in the end I abandoned it and just used their old SDK. Their examples and approach are terrible, but in the end I was able to make it work, after untangling the holy mess of macros they put there. Their old SDK is bearable, their new SDK... I still think I need to go there, but I don't have enough willpower to do that. So much moving parts. Custom build system, not just one, but actually three of them at once (cmake, ninja, west). The whole RTOS which I never needed. And not just simple one like FreeRTOS, but absolutely humongous one. Add their terrible software which they insist I must use to install their stuff. Just give me zip, I don't want to install nothing.
Let me write simple Makefile, give me thin layer over CMSIS called SDK and that's all I need. Don't make things harder than they should be, my project is simple, I don't need operating system for it.
i did not use Nordic-Zephyr, but i have run Zephyr on ESP32/STM32.
It's true that the learning curve is very step, but their idea is reasonable.
The execution is ... not that good at this moment imo. It's nearly impossible to debug device tree "macro hell", the preprocessor is not designed to debug that, and they abuse the hell out of it.
Also i'm wondering why you dont want "RTOS", in Zephyr setup, your entry point is still old boring "main" loop.