Well, sure, I'll give you that point, but it's going to happen.
>it's already a badly specced phone commanding top dollar
The selling point isn't the specs. It's the RYF certification and kill switches. Even if they can't get the RYF, it's still a better option than anything else out there.
>being made by a small company that could easily go broke in a year
I really doubt that. They have a laptop business already. They've been doing hardware for a while. This one might ship months late, but I'm confident it will happen.
>For half the price I could get a flagship Xiaomi, flash LineageOS on it and have a completely degoogled high quality Android phone likely supported for most of the next decade.
Yep, and you still have a sealed battery, a backdoored baseband, and binary blobs. The iMX.8 is pretty sweet. It has open source GPU. Can't say that for mali or powervr. I can consider making Librem 5 my convergence device.