This is why companies still choose to buy expensive microcontrollers from big name reputable manufacturers (Microchip, TI, SiLabs, NXP, Nordic, STM, Infineon, Renesas, etc.) instead of going for the cheaper Chinese ARM microcontrollers at half the price.
They tend to usually test their designs a lot more thoroughly, which adds to the final cost, and even when their products do come with flaws, they're more likely to be transparent about it and assist you with workarounds and sometimes send over field engineers on-site to help you.
They also tend to be more honest about the specs, capabilities and limitations of their products in the datasheets. Finding out half-way through the design phase that some claims in the datasheet are bogus is a no-go for most companies.
If you're just doing hobby work, or tinkering, or planning to ship millions of bottom of the barrel products on AliExpress with no intention of providing any warranty or customer support for them, then it's fine to go with whatever's the absolute cheapest, but serious companies like Apple, Sony, etc. who care about the customer experience, won't risk delaying a product launch because they wanted to save 50 cents on a new unproven cheap microcontroller who's ADCs don't work right.
I would generally agree with this, however I do find the esp32 on the whole has been as reliable as any of the major brands (although haven't had to use an ADC). We don't drive them too hard though, but their cheapness has pushed the bigger guys to get more competitive on pricing which is a good thing. TI in particular seems to have sharpened their pencil a bit, maybe due to all their new fabs coming online?
The big guys still screw up, and over the journey I've noticed quite a few MCU subfamilies go EOL far before they should and it's usually due to silicon that has too many bugs in it. Maybe the big guys told them 'no' so there weren't any decent volumes on them anymore and they were forced to adapt.
Sometimes they're a bit more subtle. You've probably seen quite a few 'A' revision part numbers recently where they clearly keep the same MCU but fix the bugs. See this on other IC's as well.
For us, logistics (supply chain) and a solid support team are the highest importance. It's rare that we're locked into a single vendor due to a must-have-feature. These requirements narrow down our choices very quickly, and I'm sure it varies region-by-region (and how much $$$ you spend).
Uh, have you read the part in my comments where I said that they're morel likely to be honest about it? Having a short errata or no errata at all doesn't mean the product is flawless. It could be that they don't know all the faults yet, or aren't sharing them, or both.
For ST it could be that they seem to be the most popular cheap ARM microcontrollers for hobbyists and consumer products, so it's easier to find faults in them since so many companies use them, similar how the most used pieces of software also have the most vulnerabilities reported on them.
Also, maybe ST was not a great example on my end, as they seem to have an obsession lately with outsourcing and farming out everything to the cheapest offshore location possible and penny pinching to the extreme for their consumer oriented parts. I don't blame them though, competition in the generic ARM microcontroller market is cutthroats and margins are slim and salaries are low and your major customers (Sony, Apple, Samsung, LG, etc) keep putting the pressure on you to lower your prices or threaten to look somewhere else.
I've most definitely run into issues with others in that list, and my reports to the companies never generated an errata.
One fun one was that when accessing the External Memory Interface module (think: parallel ROM) and switching from Bank 1 to Bank 0, the HDMI controller would get reset, but only when configured for two banks of 32 MB.
If I did one bank of 64 MB and just used the extra pin as CS, it worked just fine.
From my time in the semi industry, when reporting issues for the erata, it depends who you are.
Are you some hobbyist or small company who sent your issue report to some generic company email address? Then your report most likely neve reached anyone on the team working on that chip, but probably reached some clueless jobsworth who didn't know what to do with it because large semi companies are highly siloed and there's no centralized management for such things, so you need direct contact with the team responsible for that chip.
If you're large customer, you then have direct email addresses of support engineers, application engineers and the engineers who worked on the chip itself, and so your reports will definitely taken seriously.
There's also another issue. There's public datasheets and eratas which are often not updated or fully transparent, and then there's confidential datasheets and eratas, which are updated and issued under NDA to industrial customers on a need to know basis. As a hobbyist you rarely get all the truthful info.
It's not ideal, but the semi industry mostly focuses on large customers who buy in large volumes of product, not on hobbyists and tinkerers.
And that cost cutting is likely due to the rise of Chinese STM32 clones from companies most of us have never heard of such as GigaDevice, CKS, Geehy, MindMotion, APEX Semiconductors, etc...
I'd rather have a long errata sheet than no errata at all. I'll take truth in advertising any day over burring my head in the sand and pretending that everything's perfect.
They tend to usually test their designs a lot more thoroughly, which adds to the final cost, and even when their products do come with flaws, they're more likely to be transparent about it and assist you with workarounds and sometimes send over field engineers on-site to help you.
They also tend to be more honest about the specs, capabilities and limitations of their products in the datasheets. Finding out half-way through the design phase that some claims in the datasheet are bogus is a no-go for most companies.
If you're just doing hobby work, or tinkering, or planning to ship millions of bottom of the barrel products on AliExpress with no intention of providing any warranty or customer support for them, then it's fine to go with whatever's the absolute cheapest, but serious companies like Apple, Sony, etc. who care about the customer experience, won't risk delaying a product launch because they wanted to save 50 cents on a new unproven cheap microcontroller who's ADCs don't work right.