It looks like a new iteration of Buildroot, which kind of slid behind Yocto/OE in professional community. Is there any summary why this would be preferable to either of those?

I personally very much prefer buildroot over yocto, which feels bloated (my opinion only). However buildroot has some shortcomings that are important to me (for example it lacks a package system, which makes it difficult to do partial updates). Ptxdist adds this and also some other useful stuff, such as a mechanisms for “layers” (similar to Yocto).

I guess for me it just hits the sweet spot between simplicity and flexibility.

My company has been using it professionally since 2014, and we are very happy with the results.

it's a decent distro with a much smaller community, I'll stick with yocto and buildroot

Not really new... https://git.pengutronix.de/cgit/ptxdist/refs/

So now the question is, why didn't it get traction in over a decade?

Not excluding the possibility of an "hidden gem" here, and people in embedded tend to be conservative, but to be honest "professional" and "easy" in the same sentence looks a bit suspicious to me.

I suspect those reasons:

- It couldn't find a feature-gap between buildroot and OE/YP in order to differentiate itself and attract new developers

- It is more or less a one-vendor project

It is similar to buildroot, but more powerful. We have been using it for 10+ years with very good results.

Why no traction? Not sure about that. Perhaps it was difficult to communicate the benefits in an area where buildroot was already well established.