This is exactly true, unfortunately: proprietary tooling that costs an absolute fortune, and has a UI straight out of the very worst of the 1980s, and only works on very select proprietary platforms, is absolutely the norm with hardware work.
The Crunchlabs agent seems to be based off the Arduino Agent, so I'm surprised they don't support Linux.
My teenager never had any issues with using Linux since the age of 10 (old laptop with Firefox and Minecraft), and never used Windows (school uses Chromebooks). Hopefully this works with just a standard editor too, although the Crunchlabs IDE looks nicer for learning.
