>Those tickets would not be "unreliable" but simply "broken" with a "Won't fix" status.

Check the Wi-Fi tickets, they are sitting without any replies from the RPi team since 2025. It is broken in these configurations, I decided not to use this strong general term for this case (it's broken only in certain configurations and use cases).

The USB bug (from 2019) has not be fully fixed. They got it much less extent, but did not eliminate the issue.

>Because other vendors are way worse.

There's only a single difference: Chinese vendors don't fix issues in both things they do control and in things they don't. The thing they control is usually a "Distro Build" or Buildroot rootfs hierarchy, which I personally see little value in.

Bugs related to third-party hardware and firmware present on the board gets rarely fixed by both sides.

Don't get me wrong, I'm absolutely not happy with it. I bought Intel NUC, which has Intel Ethernet and Intel Wi-Fi, as my PC with the idea that Intel has end-user support and writes drivers, and NUCs should come with golden Linux support, right? Yet Intel developers still supposed that I had to fix the bug in Intel drivers myself: https://marc.info/?l=linux-pci&m=175368780217953&w=2