SGDK VS pvsneslib

It might have needed two at one point. I see both mentioned in a few places, but the wiki appears to say you need the full path. https://github.com/Stephane-D/SGDK/wiki/SGDK-Usage

P.S. The plan down the line is to at some point add sprites to it and port it to the Sega Genesis using SGDK so it would no longer be a text adventure game. However for now I'm having fun practicing my C skills with this and hopefully will have a cool project for my portfolio.

Examples: - Someone I know created machine-optimized library in c and asm to accelerate compression, erasure coding, and encryption on Intel Xeon CPUs (https://github.com/intel/isa-l) which runs those ops WAY faster than the standard linux libraries. - My friend is making a retro SEGA genesis game using a C and asm dev kit (https://github.com/Stephane-D/SGDK)

If you are specifically looking into the Genesis you should look into SGDK, the sega development toolkit https://github.com/Stephane-D/SGDK.

SGDK may be one reason. Nothing comparable on the SNES side.

There's an open-source SDK: https://github.com/alekmaul/pvsneslib

There is. But it doesn't get much traction for some reason. Maybe because working with SNES remains hard, even with a modern toolchain, and you'll need to deal with assembly a lot of times to get decent performance, much more than with Genesis.

I 100% recommend starting with C and PVSNESlib (https://github.com/alekmaul/pvsneslib) as suggested by others redditors.

SNES coding is hard as fuck and probably the worst way to learn programming if you start from scratch. It might be a little less painful with a C library like PVSneslib (https://github.com/alekmaul/pvsneslib), but you'll eventually have to learn 6502 assembly and read tons of documentation to harness SNES programming.

PVSNESLib for example provides a toolchain (some of it indeed being pre-written assembly "headers") that does in my experience allow for the development of fully-featured SNES games pretty much entirely in C.