You’ve just added more points of failure. Now the cloud machine can go down, your internet could drop, your wireless could fail or a variety of other problems.
It’s not a bad use case, but it doesn’t reduce problems all other things being equal.
Neither will an ESP32 that needs permanent internet acccess and relies on a publicly available API usually running on Linux servers. Running on a realtime OS is not relevant for zclaw.
It has nothing to do with being realtime. Most mcus are also not running any realtime OS.
What matters here is how dynamic and tightly coupled are the os components. On an embedded system, most of the system and their dependencies are monolithic, without any live updates. The system tends to behave almost deterministically after every reboot.
You could also swap to an distro where apt ugprade can't brick things, and where if you manually mess up you can rollback cough cough nixos cough cough
