That niche was long taken over by cheap Chinese SBCs, so they have to innovate somehow. Their only advantage that remains is the community.

The thing with the Chinese SBCs is that (like every other player in the embedded world) they don't give a flying fuck about upstreaming their code to the Linux kernel.

Of course, Raspberry Pi just like everyone else has their custom patches, but at least to my knowledge you can use a straight Linux kernel and still have a running system.