If you have a popular device, that idea is fine. If you don't, I'm not sure if you're going to have much of an option moving forward. Less common devices frequently have phone-specific builds of popular distributions like CM published by a developer-user on xda as their only non-default option.

Even CM's support for a wide range of hardware was mostly bankrolled by Cyanogen Inc, which will now no longer be funding them as they rebrand under LineageOS. It's unclear whether any but the most popular phones will continue to see support from a group that has "actual reputation" on the line or not.