In the article it mentioned Bluetooth SIG sluggishness being the primary reason that they didn’t shift over.

Unfortunately that requires work that these relatively small companies don’t or don’t want to put the resources into.

Garmin has a market cap of ~40B USD. Inflation adjusted, that's where NVIDIA was <10yr ago. It's not missing resources to do the work IMO, but it's missing the market dominance to singlehanded set the standard for the industry.

Garmin is probably the biggest company in this space, and their answer was ant. I’m not sure if you’ve tried to do any integration work with Garmin, but it’s an atrocious experience. What little they do open up is locked behind business agreements and then they hand over some 5 year out of date pdf and call it “api documentation”. So yea if it’s up to Garmin again we are screwed.

I'm worried a move to bluetooth will lead to a mess of propritary protocols that stops devices from one manufacturer working with another

All my equipment (except Tempe) is dual-standard now and my phone see my heartrate, cadence, bike speed (I don't how powermeters, though) in generic OSMAnd navigator application.

Looks like there ARE BLE profiles for these already.

I cannot think of a compelling reason why this would be beneficial.