Of course it helps if the city, and country in general, is completely flat. Cities in Norway or Nepal have mother nature against all form of manual locomotion.
Companies typically move more and more functionality to closed firmware, so they can ”open source” a thin wrapper, like a driver, that is often completely useless, and often encumbered with cryptography restrictions, strict trademarks and software patents anyway.
Closed verilog I can accept. But in general firmware is also software, for example it has become quite popular in the recent years to execute firmware on an embedded riscv cpu. And move more and more functionality to that kind of firmware.