Forth has been a great inspiration. A demonstration that great flexibility, and low level control, can be had with very low overhead or complexity.
As you note too, Forth is also useful as a counter demonstration of how important abstractions are. Without powerful abstractions (or simple abstractions that can be composed into powerful abstractions), Forth fails to scale, most especially across a team or teams, and for any expectation of general reuse, beyond basic operations.
The first version of Forth I used I wrote myself, which is probably a common event as you point out. Forth language documentation is virtually its own design doc.
Lisp is the other language I began using after buying a book and writing my own.
Thanks greatly for the links! I will be following up on those. Any insight from anywhere.
In terms of accessibility though, I'd recommend Forthkit (https://github.com/tehologist/forthkit), Miniforth (https://compilercrim.es/bootstrap/), Sectorforth (https://github.com/cesarblum/sectorforth), Sectorlisp (https://justine.lol/sectorlisp2/) Freeforth (https://github.com/dan4thewin/FreeForth2 contains an inlining cross-compiler for MSP430)
The problem with forths is that they don't seem as scalable as say lisp, from a social perspective. At a larger level, Project Oberon (https://projectoberon.net/) builds from the base CPU on FPGA, and A2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A2_(operating_system)) show what can be done to scale up.
Steps (https://github.com/robertpfeiffer/cola/tree/master/function/...) also was supposed to do this, but the available code is rather disjointed and not really easy to follow.