This has been well covered by Linus Tech Tips very recently. https://youtu.be/1vpepaQ-VQQ There's a great submission a couple hours ago on why LTT has been so effective covering it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35764232

LTT cites some other major sources that were already publishing the absurd shit packaged on the various boxes.

LTT didn't go super deep, but they did go pretty wide, & looked at a bunch of boxes, & were like, yup, all horrible, just absolutely deplorable garbage!

So sad that arm is such a lowly immature ecosystem. If these were more like the computers we know love & take for granted we'd just do a fresh install of a regular OS like Debian & these would be potentially useful interesting boxes. Instead they're just garbage forever, unless you are an embedded kernel hacker. It's crazy that arm has been around so long & is still nowhere near being a viable software platform, that the whole stack is a giant deck of cards from flakey weird bootloader, to janky forked kernels with hacked together blobs & shitty kernel code, to godforsaken abominable user lands riddled with junkware.

It's incredible to contrast to the PC world, where interoperability lead to choice lead to making things better. ARM as an ecosystem has had no need to deal straight with it's users & that's why it's been such a rotting cesspool of tech for so many decades now.