Comment by dgacmu

The comment is by the author. And it's not wrong! You can get super cheap microcontrollers for pennies that will act as an easy to use programmable oscillator, if that's what you want. And more to the point, you usually want an oscillator to _do something_, not just to wiggle in isolation, and the cheap microcontroller lets you skip the middleman in many cases.

Yes, you're using a million transistors to do something you could have done with a couple of discrete passives, but it will often result in a lower total BoM and development time. Not always.