What is your take on Qualcomm Arduino becoming Persona Non Grata

I almost always use Zephyr RTOS

docs.zephyrproject.org/.../index.html

I use the Arduino IDE, but you shouldn't have problems using VSCode with PlatformIO.  Like the Arduino IDE, you would need to use the appropriate board library (platform) and board specification depending on which Xiao type you are using.

Meh.  I don't think that Arduino has become "Perona non grata."
I'm much more interested in the "bare microcontroller replacement" Arduinos than the "runs an RTOS" or "runs Linux" boards, and the timing of the Q is a bit unforuate (what with RAM price increases and such.)  I hope that the"bottom level" boards (that one could build themselves!) remain supported and in-development, but I don't see any signs that this isn't the case.

A $25 board that has $5 "clones" or "assemble yourself from parts" as alternatives is more intersting (to me) than "another $80 linux board" or a $300 "supercomputer-class
 board.  Albeit, perhaps not so profitable. :-(

(OTOH, it's not Qualcom's forte, and things might go the way of Google's IoT efforts...)

arduino wont grow much due to their direct competition with $3-8 esp 32 boards that do as much or more

It was Arduino who really got me back into electronics after a few years break.

It was that combination of ease of getting started, good documentation and good enough software along with a massive library of community libraries, tutorials and examples.

Having used the Arduino Portenta in its early days, certainly felt the pain of not having those. Both the Portenta and Yun had an internal "bridge" between their two systems but I never felt it worked too well. For example the Yun dumped serial logs onto the bridge during boot.

I've also used some of the Qualcomm boards such as the DragonBoard, where the advantage of having a more powerful processor and a Linux O/S gives you access to software that already exists for that platform. In my case image recognition via OpenCV.  That was a platform which was a bit more challenging such as having a 1.8v GPIO and 2.0mm spaced sockets. But the documentation and support were good enough for me to complete my project, using an I/O board designed for Raspberry Pi to control the servos.

So I don't see a big divide between the two and with Arduino getting into the PLCs a few years back, they were already on a path to expand their user base into industry.

I not too sure about the new boards having having had the challenges above. And for most of my projects the low to medium powered microcontrollers are plenty as long as they can do secure networking. So I do plan to keep using Arduino boards but likely the MKR range as I like the form factor.

I lived through the MySQL assimilation by Oracle. The developers that made the decision to fork it after the Sun Microsystem aquistion were visionaries.