The sooner ARM and its closed ecosystem dies, the better. The era of shitty half working blobs has gone on for quite long enough.

Almost everything we hate about ARM based systems is the result of everyone in the SoC ecosystem, not just ARM. It's just unfortunate for them from an optics perspective that they've been basically the only CPU core on the block so they get the brunt of the hate.

I place far, far more blame on companies like Qualcomm, Broadcom, Imagination Technologies (PowerVR), etc.

Go look at any of the non-microcontroller RISC-V based SoCs. It's not any better on any metric. Upstream software support is little to non-existent. Basically every RISC-V board needs a vendor kernel and they all have device tree and u-boot hell.

The SoC providers that make powerful chips are in the market of selling more chips - bad external support is a feature for them. Means that when they stop supporting the product you have to come buy a new chip. And if everyone does that, there's no better company to switch to because they all treat you the same.

About the only SoC vendor I have any respect for is Texas Instruments because they actually upstream a bunch of their code. Honestly I think this is because most of their parts are aimed industrial products and have support cycles >10 years.

I intentionally didn't say Rockchip because while they're in a bunch of hobby boards they don't really help with open source hardware work. They just take the position of "we won't stop you, but we're not going to help you".