Maybe I'm just noticing it more, but I think there's more discussion of how to write C well than there used to be. I speculate that the attention Rust has brought to safe systems programming has caused an uptick in interest in closer-to-the-metal languages in general, and spurred C programmers to show that there are reasonable ways to write C as well. It may be an unanticipated result of Rust's popularity that the quality of C programming improves. (Or perhaps that was the plan all along?)
What I've noticed is the lead time for all sorts of things used in small embedded systems has gotten terrifyingly long. What says to me that there is a lot of embedded work going on.
Also in the last 5 years people have abandoned the JVM as a end all be all platform which puts you squarely back into native code again.
