@dec_hl Having experienced BuildRoot earlier (it's part of the same Coursera specialization), while also having worked professionally with Yocto, I do have to admit that while Yocto is more complex, it does make more sense to me.
But it's damn hard!
@dec_hl I think an apt comparison would be OpenGL vs Vulkan. 90% of the time, GL is simpler and does the trick - but it is a bit messy and might not scale well.
Vulkan is a pain to write, but it's a much more orthogonal API, as well as very flexible.
@montyontherun When I started a project needing embedded Linux back in the days the major difference for me was documentation and the ability to quickly understand dependencies, etc.
The BuildRoot docs are exceptional and everything is in one place.
Yocto documentation was lacking back then (dunno nowadays) and there were layers over layers that got pulled and you had to understand all of them in order to understand what was going on...