Embedded can be a tiny little msp430 with RAM measured in bytes, or it can be the latest and greatest intel flagship - it's a description of how the chip is used more than the chip type.
As CPUs get more powerful in general, so too do the little development boards. I can spend $10 on a board with multiple cores and megabytes of ram to drive my blinky lights and do wifi - that's enough power to run a full unix.
I’m a fairly loyal customer of adafruit. I really like their stuff and I’m not ashamed to say I really like circuit python. So much of embedded work is writing drivers and circuit python has many many already written and ready to go.
The Raspberry Pi foundation recently (about a 18 months ago) released their own dual-core ARM chip - the RP2040 - and a corresponding dev board - the Pi Pico. The Pico dev board runs about $4 plus shipping from authorized resellers.
Within the past few weeks, they introduced a wireless version - the Pi Pico W. It's about $6 from authorized resellers, though stock is hard to find at the moment.
As CPUs get more powerful in general, so too do the little development boards. I can spend $10 on a board with multiple cores and megabytes of ram to drive my blinky lights and do wifi - that's enough power to run a full unix.