> But, I thought Arduino had become officially evil once it joined Qualcomm.

They have - but for less technical users their IDE is not too bad, and there are way too many bits out there relying on it, including lots of stuff not arduino, plus it's open source. And as it reloads files on changes can be used with a real editor as well. So for the software side I'm inclined to stick with that thing.

For hardware side it's different - but every interesting arduino has shitloads of clones available. In the past I've been buying those only for special use cases where there were no genuine arduinos to support the project - now since they got crazy it's only clones, and whenever I touch any of my old projects I'm updating the list of materials to recommend buying clones. You can still get nano clones for just a bit over 1 EUR each, so for projects where that is enough that's hard to beat value for the money.