Honestly, FPGAs are easy, but HLS is a deadend. The entire industry doubled down on HLS because of perverse incentives that encourage wasting FPGA resources.
The goal of an FPGA vendor isn't to make FPGAs mainstream, no. Their goal is to sell you the biggest FPGA they can get away with even though from the customer's perspective you want to use the smallest FPGA possible to make the economics work.
The goal of an FPGA vendor isn't to make FPGAs mainstream, no. Their goal is to sell you the biggest FPGA they can get away with even though from the customer's perspective you want to use the smallest FPGA possible to make the economics work.