I worked at a place once where one of the EEs who wrote firmware told me that algorithms and data structures were pointless because in the end it's just bits in a linear address space in RAM.
The industry has basically screwed itself. It's pretty typical for companies to consider embedded/firmware as EE work that is done in the gaps of the hardware schedule. EEs generally make bad programmers which shouldn't be a surprise as their background is usually not in software development; I similarly shouldn't be hired to do EE work. Because of this the code bases tend to be abysmal in quality.
The salary for these positions tends to be tied to EE salaries which for some reason are quite low. So it's hard to attract good talent willing to deal with the extremely poor code quality and all of the other extra challenges this field has on top of normal software challenges.
Since few software developers are attracted to this niche there's not a lot in terms of libraries or frameworks either, at least not in comparison to most other software ecosystems. I've had a start-up idea for a while now to really close that gap and make embedded development far more sane in terms of feature development and such, but I worry nobody would even bother to use it.
I've been in the embedded space for years now and I've been considering bailing because the problems just aren't worth the pay.