Yes and no, SXMO will work without hardware acceleration, I've not tried but I doubt that Android will.

Additionally, minimum requirements of Android 17 are way above what SXMO allows.

With Phosh you would have a point but SXMO is lighter than a modern Android.

Lighter for what? Displaying a clock?

Add a bunch of fat, semi-desktop binaries that actually provide some kind of functionality to make it remotely comparable, and then you just have a worse, fatter system that runs hot and wastes the battery.

Android is a unified system working together to make the device race to sleep as fast as possible, with as few wakeups as feasible (e.g. batch together events that would wake up the device).