Personally I will not buy a phone that does not support CynagonMod (or visa-versa). Not sure on the long-term impact of this. Yes and I would gladly pay to get Cyanogen on my phone (with root, but they don't so I had to replace it with CynagonMod).
1) They don't actually support any devices. All devices, except the ones they sell (like that Chinese one they struggled for over one year to release, the OnePlus) are community supported.
2) Their own stuff (everything they put on top of AOSP) is of a very very bad quality, code-wise and UX-wise.
3) They are highly irresponsible. They have a Jira bug tracker with triagers that don't know anything about coding or Android at all. They have a Gerrit code review system where they antagonise all external contributors, nitpicking on everything, while Cyanogen, Inc. employees push everything they want into the tree without any code review, breaking stuff in the process (something that happens very often).
Maybe installing images could be supported through a self-signed key and fastboot.
Is there anything device-wide root is needed for on modern Android?