[oneng]

From an industry standpoint, I think you are right in that most off the shelf microcontrollers have AES acceleration built-in, and that won't change anytime soon.

Ascon, depending on the implementation, requires far less logic gates than AES to implement in hardware and requires less power, which would be an eventual cost savings.

I think most importantly though is that by not going with an ARX-based design (Addition, Rotation, XOR), it's much easier for cryptographers to perform cryptanalysis, which is what the Keccak team attributes to why it took so long to find vulnerabilities with algorithms like MD5.

https://keccak.team/2017/not_arx.html