SBCs already had a few issues.

• ARM Mali driver absence from most distros.
• Compute modules are now standard with 5V rails, making battery operation clunkier, because data centers.
• And for a very long time, the 4x MIPI buses were hidden on Raspberry Pis, locking users out from most screens to hack to them.
• MIPI itself relies on custom “ignition” codes (don’t know what the actual architectural names were for them), that can in theory, be so personalized each individual display and camera could be locked to the SoCs to the point the display itself would need the “ignition” code.

My speculation: I think a lot of these were made to hinder making actual portable devices a lot more clunkier than they need to be. For displays, many use the HDMI port instead. Even official stuff has its own clunk, like the Pi 400 using USB specifically for keyboard, all while an I2C or SPI would have been more than sufficient. The GPIOs of those SoCs were made for this kind of purpose.

Beaglebone has always been less shittified than Rpi, but didn’t keep up price-wise.

Rpi fell under the spell of consumer attention almost from the beginning, abandoning whatever mission it had to make media center boards.

Besides Broadcom, Rpi is also under the thumb of ARM. I don’t see why else the Pico didn’t use RISC-V cores with actual mul/div and floating point hardware instead of the kludges they bolted onto the cortex m0.

Raspberry pi is basically a marketing exercise for broadcom that got out of hand, so it doesn’t surprise me they’re doing this, unfortunately.