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That post really resonated with me. I attempted making my own ESP32-based remote for controlling my media centre while I'm in my kitchen, or generally away from my laptop.
The nature of embedded with interrupts (e.g. from buttons) and trying to mix in MQTT events and nice multi-layered UI made me completely question my programming abilities.
I really wanted to have modals/pop-ups (e.g. to show current volume on change) and it ended up so messy. Not only it is about control flow but about memory too (as the author mentioned). I couldn't just store a stack of "screens" to fall back to.
I'm watching this library recently: https://github.com/peterhinch/micropython-micro-gui
It seems promising to solve many of the common issues that you get, once you move from simple static information display.
I think this is mostly a problem of finding good tools for your workflow. Admittedly, there are fewer of them in the space of embedded development than for the usual "apps", but there are some. Besides the already mentioned LVGL [1] for the actual GUI you'll need a proper build tool that can handle all that conversion stuff OP's talking about reliably. I can only recommend Bob [2] here. Unfortunately, it's very unknown but brings everything you need for embedded development (w/ or w/o GUI, higher-level stuff like custom Linux images, too). Using it for years professionally and for personal projects and will never look back.
[1] https://lvgl.io
Off topic -> but on topic of the original post. Do you know if https://github.com/ocornut/imgui is available for embedded? It might be too much but it for a reasonably capable system it's better than web or some high powered UI like Qt.