Wow, super hard disagree, comment here sounds like the typical arrogance hardware engineers face from people in software who've never really done the job or have some superficial experiences.

I won't blindly state "software is easier" but software is definitely easier to modify, iterate and fix, which is why sofware tools and resulting applications can evolve so fast.

I have done both HW & SW, routinely do so, and switch between deep hardware jobs and deep software so I'm qualified to speak.

If you're blinking a light or doing something with Bluetooth you can buy microcontrollers that have this capability and yes that hardware is simple.

But have you ever DESIGNED a microcontroller, let alone a modern processor or complex system ?

Getting something "simple" like a microcontroller to reliably start-up involves complex power sequencing, making sure an oscillator works, a phase-locked-loop that behaves correctly and that's just "to make a clock signal run at a frequency" we're not talking about implementing PCIe Gen5 or RDMA over 100Gbps Ethernet.

Hardware engineers definitely welcome better tools but the cost of using an unproven tool or tool that might have "a few" corner cases resulting in your $5-million SoC not working is a hard risk to tolerate, so sadly(and to our pain) we end up using proven but arcane infrastructure.

Software in contrast can evolve faster because you can "fix it in software". New tools can be readily tested, iterated on and deployed.