We never had problems as a small vendor with ST during the chip crisis and all distributors honored our delivery contracts. Even most big companies don't deal with ST directly when it comes to the last mile.
Porting stuff to another microcontroller would be easy as we are not using too proprietary features... as long the uC has SPI/I2C and a bunch of timers the embedded developers will be happy. Thanks to Zephyr.
There's also Blitzortung.org which is a very interesting project.
They are receiving Sferics on the lower HF frequencies and tag them with GPS timestamps (with the PPS signal they are in the Nanoseconds precision range). A central server will then do the triangulation.
All with off-the-shelf hardware (STM32, etc.).
Their service is stable for many many years now.
(Offtopic: The STM32H7 ADC is great for many many things)
> But most people don't learn the big CADs first, they learn Fusion. The few times I've tried Fusion, it's given me a headache. It's probably a bigger headache going the other direction.
Siemens Solid Edge also has a hobbyist version with very fair terms.