only 32 LUTs also made me scratch my head: what kind of useful things can be made with so few components?

Microchip has a web page about "CLB"

https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microcontrollers/8-...

It includes a creative demo where your browser apparently gets hooked up with a live video stream of an actual running toy hardware setup of a "CLB demo featuring a European traffic light". It's effectively a finite state machine with two red-yellow-green traffic lights. This minimal setup already consumes 26 of the available 32 units.

Btw: as a European, let me assure you that our intersections usually consist of more than two traffic lights, include a fault state (blinking yellow light), and feature synchronized pedestrian lights on which we mostly stand until they turn green.

These are intended to implement things like specialized communication protocols, or other IO behaviour. Basically, it lets you push a variety of things you'd normally do via CPU polling to the hardware.

You could easily do SPI (or something similar, like BiSS-C) in 32 LUTs.

The Raspberry Pi Pico modules have something similar (their PIO modules, which support up to 32 instructions - https://dev.to/blues/a-practical-look-at-pio-on-the-raspberr...).

TI also have a CLB module that's actually even smaller (though they document theirs) - https://www.ti.com/lit/ug/spruir8b/spruir8b.pdf

Basically, this is a pretty broadly available IO abstraction.

These MCUs are generally targeted for low-power uses and various industrial & automotive stuff. They're not meant for anything high-bandwidth - you'd be using a 32-bit ARM or RISC MCU for that, or a SoC.

So, think of it more in terms of offloading simple automation or logic glue to dedicated hardware to save a microamp or keep the state machines tidy.