it has almost always been morally correct to educate yourself in electronics using knock-off Arduino boards at a fraction of the truly absurd retail price, and even more so now that Qualcomm is pulling some truly heinous anti-consumer closed-ecosystem rights-grab shit that spits directly in the face of the open hardware culture that the entire educational devboard concept was founded on.
please, for the love of fucks, don't spend silly money on branded devboards and breakouts. hit up AliExpress and buy an ESP32 devboard or similar for about 5 currency units. these things are hilariously cheap to make and they work perfectly fine. and hell, a dirt cheap ESP32 devboard is basically exactly what an IoT product looks like inside, so if you're looking for transferrable firmware skills then that's a thousand times better suited than AVR (which I've haven't seen in a product in 10yrs)
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