Largely agreed. There's been some very dedicated people open sourcing support for RPi pieces, which is amazing to see, but it's been herculean efforts over many years with seemingly no support.
This is unfortunate & sad, but at least things have been moving forward. The much sadder story is wifi routers. OpenWRT used to have pretty broad support for a wide range of routers, but there have been less & less people making chipsets, and now you're probably getting either Broadcom or Qualcomm/Atheros. Broadcom has never been a "good" player in this space, but since 802.11ac routers started showing up over half a decade ago, the community has been unable to get a foothold in on Broadcom routers (I'm not sure if we have access to the bootloaders that we need, and I'm rather confident that we don't have access to open or closed drivers that we can use to run these Broadcom wifi routers).
It's frankly scary how controlled & inflexible the wifi router world is. This is further compounded by a general un-availability of add-on wifi cards: even though these chips are just PCIe devices, there's incredibly poor availability of things like PCIe cards & m.2 and mpcie cards one might add to a regular PC to make one's own wifi-router.
This is all to say, watching Broadcom has been really a scary, horrifying company to watch. The consumerization- the exclusion of the enthusiast & maker- has been very clear with Broadcom in specific, amid a market that's already shaky & at risk. The rich geeks keep fleeing to enterprise gear, the consumer keeps getting more and more stratified tiers of expensive consumer devices, and the ability to run our own networks keeps seemingly vanishing. And Broadcom is a colossus of a company that has obstructed & prevented the kind of healthy, resilient, community-powered growth that has lead to so much progress in every other sector of computing.
Leaving wifi-router discussion, I'm really hoping we start seeing more Broadcom SoC competitors show up with good offering, more single-board-computer offerings. Amlogic is doing very well with keeping upstream support, their S905X3 is a very nice chip. But the Cortex A55 core is not as powerful as the Broadcom's A73's, & there's not the dual-video out. Folks like MediaTek and Qualcomm have lots of good offerings, but no presence in the maker world. NXP does a pretty good job supporting makers, but usually at a high price point for somewhat aged cores. If you do want to investigate alternatives to RPi, this comparison of the Broadcom-based RPi4 vs an
Amlogic S905X3 Odroid-C4 is a decent starting point:
https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/04/24/raspberry-pi-4-vs-od...