I don't know of any situation where the ARM ecosystem works like that, the companies compete for differentiation, they have a very limited interest in standardisation. Maybe I'm missing what you're referring to. It also wouldn't get you a phone, it would get you a base board but all the other bits like radios compete on the different manufacturers platforms.
I'm not suggesting that this be done purely from the standpoint of altruism: for both the IP providers and the various foundations, this would provide them with a possible path to participate in mobile that is closed to them currently so it seems like it's in their interest from an existential standpoint. That said, maybe it really is impossible to motivate any of the players necessary to go down this path. In which case it seems worthwhile for the open source crowd to go all-in on something like RISC-V/OpenGPU and jettison the proprietary IP as completely as possible, as soon as possible.
I've been living this for the last several years both with Android and ARM devel/hobbyist boards and it isn't much fun. It would be nice these quasi-business entities (i.e. Mozilla, Canonical) would forget about their brand-exclusive strategies and try to rally around an open ARM-based platform (you know, with support for things like, I don't know, GPUs and such) they can all run on. THAT I could get excited about and we could all win. Short of that, I don't get what I want and they continue to lose relevance in the mobile era. Granted, I'm part of the 1% that runs Linux. But here's a newsflash: right now we're the only ones who care about Canonical, Mozilla, etc. and ~1% beats 0%.