Yeah, if you looked into it deeper you’d find that this is entirely to make the system more secure, not less. When this thing boots, every stage of the boot is cryptographically verified. Camera, microphone, payments, etc are all routed through the ARM chip and can’t be accessed through the CPU at all. Compiling Linux and not getting any of these features just so you can theoretically “know what’s going on” (as if you’re going to read the source anyway) does not really make much sense.