Comment by jki275

It's neither.

The Arduino ecosystem is objectively garbage, for a host of reasons. Yes, it is an "abstraction layer", that attempts to abstract away all the hard stuff from a whole host of different microcontrollers, and does it in some really bad (and broken) ways.

Arduino prioritizes making things easy for the person who doesn't know how to write embedded code. That's fine, as far as it goes. The problem with things like this is when people put them in production anyway, because "it works" on the bench and there's no need to bother with making sure it actually works.