Is bare-metal programming still a thing?
The normal meaning of &quot;bare metal&quot; is no operating system. So all computer systems can roughly get categorized as either bare metal, RTOS or hosted system (full-blown OS). So &quot;bare metal&quot; doesn't necessarily mean microcontroller programming, even though that's the most common use for it - it could as well mean a x86 bootloader or some such. Or the hosted operating system itself.
If to program &quot;bare metal&quot;, RTOS or hosted depends on the application and requirements. In particular, real-time or high integrity systems are always programmed bare metal or with RTOS.
As for microcontrollers, 8 bitters are unfortunately still widely used. Personally I've stopped using them and will never go back. However, modern ARM Cortex M is most often programmed &quot;bare metal&quot; as well. Same with DSP and various SoC that include a MCU core.