I’ve spent the entire day solving this issue :) While all ATtiny85 were responsive and happy, both ATmega328 refused to work with avrdude throwing the error below while working perfectly with Arduino.
The problem was that Arduino uses a 16Mhz external crystal as chip’s clock, and chip is pre-programmed to use it. Just add a 16 Mhz crystal with two 22 pF capacitors as at picture below:
And microcontroller will respond to avrdude:
As far as I know, microcontrollers can be instructed to use internal clock instead of external crystal, but I am yet to find out how to do this.
In general, while crystal takes extra 2 pins off AVR, it enables microcontroller to run at a better (and more precise) frequency. In my small projects I plan to use ATtiny mostly with internal clock since it only has 8 pins. With ATmega, I probably will use a crystal more often, but I pulled it from Arduino and started all this AVR programming hobby because I wanted as much compact solutions as possible, with no to minimal extra stuff, so I still prefer more pins to a faster clock.