Or like it's 2025. Plenty of current-production parts using an 8051 core as either their main sequencer, or as a low power core with bigger options on the main power rail.
Can you give an example? I see RISC-V being used to replace custom 16 and 32 bit cores, and M0-class ARM cores, in the 10k+ gate range, but haven't really seen a migration in the 8 bit space.
I have personally ported a usb c usbpd stack from 8051 to cortex m0 to rv32ec. I can’t talk for gate count, it for code size the biggest factor was the compiler, with ARMCC giving the smallest code. As the rom was larger than the core, that was a bigger factor in gate count.