Modern toolchains, programming languages, dev cartridges and libraries from the community makes all the difference. Outside of some niceties like ICE (gotta write that GDB stub for target hardware at some point), it's not that different from what you'd experience with modern embedded work.
Also,
2026 web dev: 4MB of JavaScript to render a button. 2026 N64 dev: entire FPS in 1MB
valorzard•49m ago