In a way, it's ironic. The AVR tooling back in the day was just so much better than PIC (for a novice hobbyist, pre-Arduino).
But you're right, the tooling has come a long way. The proliferation of ARM in so many domains means lowly microcontrollers can benefit, as opposed to being bound by the manufacturer or community size.
Hopefully RISC-V will improve this even further.
In was more hopeful in past then I'm now with the RISCV ecosystem.
The issue there is fragmentation, so it's not RISCV... every vendor will have their tooling because they'll be adding their secret sauce that they wont be sharing with everyone else, which is a shame.
I'm disappointment MPLAB X Ide only supports x86 Macs. Also, release 6.20 was Jan 2024 so the release cycles are pretty long... doesn't inspire confidence.