Yes that is a bad thing from the following perspective / aspects:
- Accessibility and learning curve for those that are not professional embedded developers.
- Arduino framework is available for many microcontroller families. For ARM based solutions each microcontroller manufacturer seems to use/require its own specific platform, framework and tooling. For non-ARM native tooling (e.g. ESP32) the same holds.
- Often these are commercial tools costing much money (out of reach for non-professionals).
- Unlike the Arduino framework there appears to be no other ‘one size fits all’ solution.
I understand that Arduino has its lacks but due to broad community support and availability of libraries (whatever their quality), Arduino is what many non-professionals (i.e. not embedded developers) use.
In all these years, I have not seen any good advice like “Use the following framework and tools instead of Arduino. They support cross-platform development for different microcontroller families, have wide community support and make that you can leverage your existing knowledge”.
For professional embedded developers things will be different. The Things Network is community based however and many people (users, supporters) in that community are not professional embedded developers.