You're likely right but i think if you had to fail at least fail for something meaningful. It was crazy thinking it could work anyway, same for makers like Nothing, i feel their fate is written in stone, at least try something really different instead of gimmicks.

Nowhere close to what you asked, but Nothing already seems to be one of the most "open" devices today.

That's for simple fact of having offline/unsigned EDL (Qualcomm's Emergency DownLoad) and files for it getting consistently "leaked". So at least exploratory work on custom ROMs should never leave you with a irrecoverable brick.