I don't think it's a that strange comparison when you start looking at the end customers. There's certainly a market, mainly small to medium scale industrial automation, that really wants to write custom software to control machinery, but doesn't have the necessary background to run a meta-distribution system like Yocto.

Most SoC vendors provide a Debian image precisely for this market segment. The thing is, a lot of the guys who need a Linux embedded system are not embedded engineers, so they greatly benefit from having something like Debian, which has infinite resources to build upon.