The other option is that Arduino simply fades away. Their hardware doesn't have anything to offer that you can't get on aliexpress or spin yourself for a tenth the cost.

The framework is the only arguably valuable thing they offer, but even that's not enough to prop a business up on.

Most likely everything will continue exactly as-is: Arduino hardware will become increasingly dated and undesirable, and open source Arduino-compatible libraries will continue flourishing until nobody remembers that Arduino was a hardware platform before it was software framework.

I think we've long since passed the point where Wiring will ever go away, but I doubt we'll still be calling it Arduino for too much longer. Arduino is probably dead, and espressif is moving in.

Yeah I personally never really bought into Arduino. I got their Uno back whenever it came out but never really got into their whole IDE experience. Latest projects are on esp32 using embassy which so far has been going great. Interested to check out rp2040 or rp2350 at some point maybe.. There are tons of interesting, easy options out there now