hackernews its like reddit but the user submitted links are tech and research of hardware heavy. A good portion of my RSS feed is from blogs that posts were submitted to there.

Not really, HDL is HDL. At the end of the day, as long as you know what you want to do electrically then everything else is an exercise of translating that desire into VHDL, Verilog, or SystemVerilog. The only real hassle is creating test-benches and verification simulations. But at that point it’s discretionary towards the designer. A lot of tools coming from Intel, Xilinx, and Synopsys allow you to “black box” components. So a module written in VHDL can be incorporated into a design or test bench written in verilog and vis-versa. IMHO VHDL is still dominant because grey beard chief engineers throw a little hissy fit at design reviews when they learn the junior engineers did everything in verilog.

A ton of people. Anything aerospace, DoD, Space, or critical infrastructure. All those industries have to use VHDL to support legacy products from the 80s and 90s. At that point everyone is like, “Sure its 2025, by why switch to SystemVerilog? We already know VHDL.” and thus you got a whole army of engineers making next gen satellites, augmented reality headsets, etc. …… in VHDL 93.

Not as impossible sounding. I mean I would never attempt it but you might be able to get away with it using a stencil, solder paste and one of those fancy toaster ovens with a broil setting. ROI would suck since you are probably gonna fail the first couple of times.