[hakfoo]

There's an obvious market for "wildly unbalanced" microcontrollers.

The actual "elevator controller" or "e-scooter controller" or whatever would run fine on a Z80, but it has to pull something from the cloud (config file, activation unlock). Suddenly, you need a MCU big enough to talk to Wifi/BT/cellular modem, and handle TCP/IP/SSL, and you're looking at ARM and x86 parts.

Something like the "wi-fi modem" concept you see for retrocomputing might be interesting. A black-box component that handles all the connectivity, you pre-program it with the specs of the network transfer, and it exposes the controls and UI for "select wi-fi network/pair bluetooth/etc". On the MCU's side, it would just have a very basic serial or parallel interface, that 8-bit tooling could handle easily.