Each target platform has its own quirks and characteristics. Much of this is due to the development history of that platform. For a platform such as AVR, it's fairly coherent, as it was developed by a single company (Atmel) over many years, so it's fairly consistent between different chips and the tools that are used for the platform.
A platform such as ESP8266 (and to some extent its ESP32 successor) was never designed to be used as a generic MCU system, which shows in its rather sketchy and fragmented software ecosystem. Though things have gotten better over the past few years, with various frameworks and open source tools smoothing over the roughest spots, it's a platform where it's easy to make mistakes due to a lack of documentation, issues with tools, and a lack of on-chip debugging.
The ARM MCUs (Cortex-M) are being produced...
