I used to play around with 8051 variants and 8pin/16pin PICs back in 2010, whats the equivalent beginner chips now? I have been out of touch since around 2012, except for pi3/4.
Nowadays there's a plethora of options available for beginners. Heck, even PICs have dev boards available with built-in programmers, so you connect it to your computer using regular old USB cable and you can build away using Microchip toolchains. Depending on your comfort level of low-level C, I'd probably still stay away from PICs as a beginner.
There's Arduinos and all the numerous clones (cheaper, different features). The main benefit of Arduino ecosystem would be that it's really easy to find libraries and/or content on the internet that gets you real close to solving your problems without having to write too much code yourself.
And of course very cost effective ESP32 based offerings that excel at wireless usecases (WiFi, bluetooth).
Recently there's even more beginner friendly boards appearing using MicroPython where you don't even need a toolchain. You connect the board to your computer, it appears as a mass storage device, you drop your Python code on it... and that's it, the board runs the code when you disconnect from the computer.
Have a browse through Adafruit and Sparkfun stores to get an idea of all the possible (beginner friendly) boards out there.
What are the beginner microcontroller chips now?
I used to play around with 8051 variants and 8pin/16pin PICs back in 2010, whats the equivalent beginner chips now? I have been out of touch since around 2012, except for pi3/4.