I'm head of engineering at a local kiosk company (www.advancedkiosks.com) and we are doing fun things with very little resources! We recently implemented Google MediaPipe for presence detection. That was fun. We use custom printed microcontroller boards to control certain peripherals like LED strips and fans. We design in 3D print our own brackets. Things like that. The job requires a lot of creativity and knitting together of technologies. Pretty good fun. Beats writing yet another distributed CRUD SaaS app...though we do have a couple of those. I don't know if my employer qualifies as a startup, but we're pretty small and doing cool things.
I remember implementing a "kiosk" but the way my employer wanted it was a full screen electron/react app running on a windows server. It was such a pain working around windows to grab full screen, start a GUI application and so on... all the while I kept thinking, this could be a "simple" Qt/QML app running on frame buffer on an RPI! Heck, we could even customize the startup screen, and it would be easily a magnitude faster with 1/100 the hardware!
That surprised me also. We ended up writing a window manager application to force the kiosk UI window to always be on top and I up front...even after all the registry edits. So, yup, I feel you there!
