Ah, the good old days where computers had a serial port and you could assemble an AVR programmer on a breadboard to flash an AVR and build a USB programmer.. Programmer bootstrapping ?

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.