Hmm.. how do you suppose any commercial product could have ever competed with free development environments and compilers?
From my point of view it was about time to quit developing PBP about the time Arduino became a thing,
not that I ever have, or ever will use one, so long as proper C platforms are also free.

I don’t think anyone is surprised. New generation controllers started arriving long ago, but without any support.
After ten years, and having to learn a new language anyway, you might as well adopt a real IDE & compiler for whatever mcu of choice.

PBP was never going to become an Arduino like platform because it’s an expensive commercial product,
but I wouldn’t even compare the two for what they are (or were) in their time.
The Arduino platform hides what you don’t need to know (which is actually what you do need to know), and shields serve to shield people from learning any electronics,
At the end of the day, many so called hobbyists get to plug one board into another, and get to say they made something.
That’s why Arduino represents the dilution of two hobbies to me.

The worst thing about PBP is the manual, which tells you how not to use it, and for me, the best thing was a good avenue to learning assembler,
for which, the last few remaining popular low resource controllers, are probably going to be the last reason to ever do so.