A lot of commercial projects based on SBCs are relatively niche. It's very common to see things like lighting controllers, hobbyist stuff, etc, that's in the run size of 500 at the very most, basically be a raspberry pi with a custom hat in a custom plastic case. That can sustain a medium sized business.

Designing and fabbing your own boards doesn't always make sense until you're on a version 2, or 3.

use CM4 modules with your own carrier board makes sense when you're building 500+.

I read somewhere if you're building more than 10,000 devices, it's better to design the whole PCB board on your own. Before that volume, using SOM modules for time to market could be more reasonable.

10.000 probably isn't even enough to get Broadcom to reply to your emails. Good luck getting your hands on the required documentation, let alone the actual chips!

true,never liked Broadcom myself,wish RPi picked some different cpu from companies that are more open source friendly.

I wonder how that compares to Expressif.