West

Zephyr can feel heavy when first encountered.

Blinking an LED may involve a board definition, devicetree, overlays, Kconfig, CMake, west, and driver bindings. Compared with direct register code or a vendor HAL call, the path looks indirect.

But Zephyr is not mainly about making a tiny demo run. It is better understood as a platform engineering model for multi-board, multi-configuration, long-lived, connected embedded devices.

The first model is:

lightweight RTOS: application organized around kernel objects and SDKs
Zephyr: application organized around configuration, hardware description, driver model, and subsystems

If the project has one board, a few peripherals, and a short life, Zephyr may feel costly. If it must maintain boards, feature variants, and shared drivers, the structure starts to matter.