In other words, circling back to Brad Cox's Software ICs, we're all using devboards and Arduinos instead, because those look simple to newbies and save a little glue work here and there.

In hardware world, it's fine to use devboards and Arduinos to prototype things, but then you're supposed to stop being a newbie, stop using breadboards, and actually design circuits using relevant ICs directly, with minimal amount of glue in between. Unfortunately, in software, manufacturing costs are too cheap to meter, so we're fine with using bench-top prototypes in production, because we're not the ones paying the costs for the waste anyway, our users are.

(Our users, and hardware developers too, as they get the blame for "low battery life" of products running garbage software.)