https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_eZ80
But the thing is that you keep getting dragged kicking and screaming to ARM because even if it is boring it is capable, affordable and everywhere.
And I say this as someone who still knows z80 opcodes from high school programming TI calculators. I love the thing but man is 32-bit nice.
I recall with considerable fondness those ISAs that could be understood in ultimate detail by a simple human - the monolithic supercomputers like the Cray 1.
Coding assembly for the 8088 it was painfully obvious that instructions were competing on the bus with data, which is why the string instructions were so important
http://www.righto.com/2023/04/8086-microcode-string-operatio...
Today people would scoff at that sort of thing because a tight loop can sit in the I cache and be just as efficient as a microcoded string instruction.
I traded my Coco 3 (which unlike the PC had a real multitasking OS) for an 80286 machine and that was a massive jump in performance because the 80286 was starting to get those complex features that would start the "Moore's Law" period where computers got notably better on a year by year basis. The awful truth of memory latency really forces you do those "horrible" things if you want to get near the performance that is possible.
Today I am an AVR8 fan because it has separate buses for instructions and data and gets awesome performance for something very simple that doesn't use all the tricks that later processors use. It's the last 8-bit processor so it stands head and shoulders above the rest in terms of clean design and it's got a mainframe-sized register file. In assembly language you can frequently keep most of the variables you use all the time in registers, dedicate a few registers to the interrupt handler so you don't need to swap registers, etc.
As for the Cray and the IBM 3090's vector units it was nice that those things had vector instructions that weren't bound to a particular implementation length unlike the SIMD instructions that Intel has so often fumbled with that require you to rewrite your code every two year if you want to keep up, aren't available across the line (so people other than national labs and Apple don't use them) and are arguably a waste of power and die area at this point.
And yet many cheap electronic devices will continue to be built and sold with 4-bit microcontrollers because 32 bit is overkill for those use cases and $0.40 is too expensive when 4-bit dies cost $0.05 or even $0.01, and $0.35 in savings is huge in high enough volume.
You won't see any new products developed in the west using such microcontrollers but they're still alive and kicking and there's still developers for them in Asia.
https://www.eevblog.com/2018/11/07/eevblog-1132-the-3-cent-m...
That 3c is packaged & all :-) One-time programmable iirc.
At some point you get to a weird place where the logic transistors are so small you get some gate count for free just fitting around the pad drivers and pin protection diodes. We're getting pretty rapidly to the ~10k gate count there where a stripped down classic RISC makes sense.
I had to look it up, from urbandictionary.com:
also written as moé. A Japanese slang term (ironically, first employed by otaku) used to refer to the fetish for or sexual attraction to idealized people, usually a fictional perfect young girl.
Since then, moé has come to be used as a general term for a hobby, mania or fetish (non-sexual or otherwise). This is contrasted with otaku, which would be taking the specific hobby, mania or fetish to harmful levels.
These days most smaller cores are integrated with peripherals, which can easily take the bulk of the silicon area (+cost). Then it's effectively free to tack on a small 32 bit core like Cortex-Mx (or even small 64b core). Why bother with 8/16 bit one?
I suspect RISC-V may eat a lot of that market in years ahead.
For components where CPU core is a good portion of the silicon (microcontrollers, RFID tags, toys, etc etc), that may be different. That's why many old 8/16 bit architectures are still around in one form or another.