I think I've covered the material needed for a beginner to analyze and choose microcontrollers. However, a beginner may not be comfortable with reading datasheets, or families of datasheets. As such, I'll help beginners through microcontroller families.
CubeIDE does some checks which means clone bluepill boards don't work with it - you can't flash or debug. The methods I found online to get around this didn't help except for a stackexchange answer that got me most of the way. I figured I'd rewrite the answer with some small changes and add in a few details I needed to make it work.
This isn’t meant as a political post, I just thought it was interesting the type of tech used, especially considering the 328 is in so many hobbyist MCUs like the uno.