The debuggability is also far better I expect, as a person who has spent hours tracing some crash deep in LwIP because of a bad flag or wrong interrupt priority.
Assuming you're working with a quality VM and drivers, development speed is also improved. A lot of low level details have already been worked out in the VM thus freeing the programmer to work at a higher level.
I think it's especially scary when most devkits come with it pre-integrated by the manufacturer, but the quality of that integration varied widely. My experience is nearly a decade out of date at this point, but when I was last going Cortex M3 stuff, I found that the integration of TI/Stellaris was excellent, and the integration on STM32 was one landmine after another— and the same held true for the USB stacks, even for stuff that should have been dirt simple like just emulating a serial port.
Yeah the STM32 dev kit (CubeMX etc) is all kinds of horrifying. ESP-IDF is better in some ways, worse in others. Its LwIP integration (esp_netif) is okay but has some interesting bugs you can hit. Like creating sockets leaking memory even after the socket is closed! Yay!
