> not everything robot related is done in ROS, but it's almost a standard within the field save for a few exceptions.
In academia, yes. ROS is a piece of middleware for passing messages around, and a standard for talking to it. Funding agencies pushed academic robotics projects to talk to ROS so that results from different projects could interoperate. Which they sort of do. You get a lot of tooling for logging, user interfaces, wiring things up, etc.
Think of it as a solderless breadboard for robotics software.
The final product probably doesn't use it.
I disagree here, usually projects that are not keen on relying on ROS end up re-implementing a lot of the groundwork (shared memory, message distribution, parameter server, logging, etc.), usually they are older products (10 or 15+ years old), where ROS wasn't really a thing and migrating to ROS after implementing their own tailored stack is not worth it.
In academia, yes. ROS is a piece of middleware for passing messages around, and a standard for talking to it. Funding agencies pushed academic robotics projects to talk to ROS so that results from different projects could interoperate. Which they sort of do. You get a lot of tooling for logging, user interfaces, wiring things up, etc. Think of it as a solderless breadboard for robotics software. The final product probably doesn't use it.