I've hope projects like Halium, UBports, Plasma Mobile, etc end up bringing an open hardware project.
I recently tried lineage, ubports and plasma, and though I liked ubports, lineage was a breath of fresh air. Selinux, opengapps, regular privacy notifications, twrp, and privacy and security seem to have not taken a back seat in general. Sign me up.
If there hadn't been contracts 10yrs ago, I probably would have gotten an openmoko. Wanted one badly. If lineage, ubports, and plasma among others can keep developing alternatives to stock android, no reason to see why at least some or all hardware doesn't follow. It's taken AMD the better part of 10 years to have open source drivers that are as good as their closed source drivers on almost all of their GPUs if I'm not mistaken.
Which raises the question: if you want a phone that can run a FOSS mobile OS, what do you choose today? Nexus 5 and OPO were great a few years back (I bought the latter) but there is a need in the marketplace for (read: I need) an updated product that can run such a mobile OS.
This allows projects such as Mer, Plasma Mobile, LuneOS, UBports and AsteroidOS etc to pool efforts without any distro-specific assumptions.
Google's project treble might make haliums' job a bit easier, so you might see halium on more devices than you'd think. Just speculating.