OE is very much a thing in embedded Linux. You might also want to look up the Yocto Project.
I know that places like Formlabs use it (source: interned there), and 100% agree with the sibling comment: there's a huge, painful learning curve to get started.
It's a combination of a lot of problems: the question of what expertise level to write tutorials/walkthroughs for, decent documentation (that you think you understand but then realize, oh shit, no, I don't), knowing the ecosystems (man, the sheer F/OSS drama that you can discover while searching for something...), were all problems that I noticed just trying to extend our build system.
Part of the problem is due to the small community of developers involved. There are a lot of ways to package and build your source tree, especially if you draw from a lot of different projects. See the chromium or android projects to see what I mean. If you compare the smaller and older embedded projects to the Arduino community, it's like day and night. The Arduino project has a much larger community of users and contributors which has given it much better libraries, tools, and support.
I know that places like Formlabs use it (source: interned there), and 100% agree with the sibling comment: there's a huge, painful learning curve to get started.
It's a combination of a lot of problems: the question of what expertise level to write tutorials/walkthroughs for, decent documentation (that you think you understand but then realize, oh shit, no, I don't), knowing the ecosystems (man, the sheer F/OSS drama that you can discover while searching for something...), were all problems that I noticed just trying to extend our build system.