I admired Kawasaki, but I don't think he had that much clout at Apple. This was the part that Apple never got. Indeed, not too many years later, Apple announced to the business press that they were going to de-emphasize engineering applications and focus on their core strengths in the arts and education.
I remember an article by Kawasaki proclaiming that the Mac was going to be the go-to platform for an emerging field called Embedded Systems. Virtually no embedded systems tooling was ever developed for the Mac. I created Mac hardware by programming it on an MS-DOS machine. I'm grateful that MacOS and MS-DOS let me bypass the Windows 3.1 era.
I am not sure that Windows was any better, but Windows allowed dropping back to MS-DOS mode and creating ugly-but-works tooling. Then Visual Basic came along and made it easy. And today, anything I'm like to do with "the engine" will preferably involve Linux.
But wow did a lot of systems get developed in it. Microsoft still haven't got a decent replacement for it and nobody else does either.
Think of it as an early version of LabVIEW.
HC allowed "code resources" to be added, like plug-ins, which I wrote in Pascal or C. That's how I created drivers. It gave me the performance benefit of course, while allowing me to deal with just the tiny bits of the OS needed to deal with my hardware.
The hardware was either homemade (microcontroller programmed on a MS-DOS machine), or plug-in boards made by National Instruments that luckily came with a C API.
While the term "jailbreaking" was introduced for the iPhpne, the concept was already familiar to me.
An odd irony is that the stuff I've worked on over the years has always involved relatively slow processes, so I've been able to live with the performance tradeoffs of "easy" programming tools.