I agree strongly with the sentiment of this article, the author missed the fully open source programmable systems like the Lattice ECP5 and 40K FPGAs. There is something magical about using the LiteX "make me an SOC out of this board" system.
As the ACM Digital has gone open access I can recommend this Jan Gray paper, "Hands-on Computer Architecture – Teaching Processor and Integrated Systems Design with FPGAs"[1] There are different opinions on whether or not understanding computer architecture makes you a better developer or not (I tend to think it does) but its a really amazing time to be able to explore these concepts without the need to be at a company or in an University setting.
LiteX is very neat, but at the same time is a massive pain as soon as you move past building an example SoC. I've been spending a lot of time on this recently.
As the ACM Digital has gone open access I can recommend this Jan Gray paper, "Hands-on Computer Architecture – Teaching Processor and Integrated Systems Design with FPGAs"[1] There are different opinions on whether or not understanding computer architecture makes you a better developer or not (I tend to think it does) but its a really amazing time to be able to explore these concepts without the need to be at a company or in an University setting.
[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1275240.1275262