I would imagine IoT to be even better, but hopefully less cloud-connected. I can see plenty of use cases in my own life where if I could put a microcontroller somewhere I could help iron out some unnecessary friction/do something fun and cool, but would never hand over that functionality to some faceless corporation to do whatever they want with my lightbulb data or what have you. It seems to me there's no point to that at all if you're just using some gadget you have.

look into esp home + home assistant, and you'll quickly start building those little devices.