During the ARM announcement they said they would be contributing support to open source projects, and Homebrew was on the slide, along with a dozen or so other major projects (though Homebrew itself represents hundreds). I do not know what form that assistance will come in.

Apple has been dropping lots of balls in this way.

They should support open source in an official way. They should support other languages besides swift. They should support virtualization/containers. They should embrace techies, scientists and engineers. But it seems they're closing down these areas of their ecosystem.

IMO Mac OS X should come with its own integrated package manager and corresponding central repository for distribution of various open source software packages. A package manager that worked well with the App Store and Xcode.

This is their only real chance to keep Devs from migrating to Windows 10 with WSL2 or baremetal Linux. I couldn't believe they didn't announce any thing for Big Sur, I could have sworn they would if they really cared about non-macOS/ipadOS/iOS devs. Especially that they're also dropping Perl/Python/Ruby frameworks.

If anything, they could have just low-key embrace brew and take it from there. They didn't, and I think that sends a message: they've given up.