As an EE: no, just no. This is like asserting that the average programmer routinely writes thousands of lines of C in a highly distributed environment. And like programmers, once you're at this scale of complexity, it's far too big to fit into a single human skull, and you absolutely must have an entire team of people.
> Yet they don’t rely on anything analogous to our type checkers.
We absolutely do. Every day. When we lay out a PCB, there are dozens and dozens of safe/sane checks happening in the background at all times.
Counterpoint: we have all kinds of situations where type checking would save us. Ask anyone who has implemented an I2C driver. We're twiddling bits and we have a huge pile of magic numbers from the vendor. There is absolutely no way to verify that your driver isn't going to set the chip on fire other than to try it. It takes hours and days to validate.
When we write to CPU registers, there is absolutely no way to check in advance if you've set the bit you want, or if you've set a bit that permanently burns some efuses and bricks the chip.
> They use different architectural principles—isolation, explicit interfaces, and time-aware design—that make their systems naturally more robust and understandable.
I'm gonna stop reading right here. Hardware systems are exactly as robust and reliable as software. Because hardware is software. There is almost nothing in the modern day that operates on straight digital/analog logic without any code. Everything is running software and the vast majority of it is written in C with Classes.
I surmise that the author has never met an EE or even seen a circuit board. They also have never written or seen a single line of C.
But really, C is the only argument you need. We invented typed languages because C is so godawful.
I think this is the same thing as vaccine denial. We've lived in a world without these problems for so long that certain people without critical thinking skills just don't believe the problem ever existed in the first place, so the remedies we've spent generations building are an undue and dangerous burden. This is a remarkably unintelligent and uninformed line of thinking that is sadly far, far too common.