Yocto works the same way whether it’s Pi or iMX, most of the learning curve has nothing to do with the SoC. So it’s really strange to hear that your Pi workflow is better than anything you’d get with another chip..

BSP quality is famously variable by board vendor, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niH1-NB6W8w

  Two products.. leveraged a Yocto-based board support package (BSP); one being in AgTech, and the other being in the veterinary space. These products have followed disparate practices when leveraging the BSP for custom hardware and software.. this talk [described] the two products, how the BSP was customized and used, and the resulting consequences.*

But on a Pi you don't have to use Yocto. Raspbian is always faster to develop for.

Source: have worked on both Pi based solutions and custom hardware with yocto.

Yeah, one is easier and the other is right. Shipping a reproducibly built readonly rootfs image takes longer, but is strictly better than putting 'some' versions of Debian packages on the SD card and calling it a day.

It's the Arduino curse - sure, it's faster to ship Hello World with Arduino but soon you realize all your libraries were built by beginners and use delay() everywhere so you're screwed if you need two peripherals to work at once.

You use Pi for prototypes and one-offs, not where you need to ship something that's actually competitive on BoM.

These days you can make anything have a readonly rootfs by using overlayfs. Just wipe your overlay partition to do a factory reset.

> something that's actually competitive on BoM.

Some applications are profitable at only hundreds of devices deployed. In which case, the moment you say "BoM" the hardware bill triples.

If you ship thousands to millions, of course you're right.

Not using Yocto simplifies and speeds development extremely, unless you have dedicated staff familiar with Yocto. It’s a big reason to prefer Pi.

No, your memory is spot on. I also eval'd dozens of ARM (and some x86) SBCs for embedded use back in the early/mid-2010s and most of the BSPs were awful. You'd be locked into some ancient several-year old Linux kernels and documentation (and even actual hardware support) was often buggy/incomplete. God help you if you need to customize the boot/spin your own (Yocto was still new then, I assume life is a bit easier now).