In my opinion their progress has been fantastic, and I am quite excited for the future of Linux smartphones.
You can actually get under $100 if you compromise the specs just a little.
There don't seem to be any builds anywhere for the 4.1 (is it an uncommon phone?)
For argument's sake, let's say you bought the 6.1, now your option is to download an "unofficial" ROM from some pseudo-anonymous person with an anime avatar from XDA, hosted on whatever free file hosting they can find today.
Don't get me wrong, I used Lineage when it was called Cyanogenmod, and it saved one phone from landfill which is great. But I'm older now, and I need my phone to work and work well - I really don't have time for problems like https://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?s=76595163ac85.... For some people, that's worth the money.
Edit: here's all the proprietary blobs that'd need to be reversed to be audited to make sure they're not selling you out, too - https://github.com/nokia-dev/proprietary_vendor_nokia/tree/a.... Props to HMD for publishing them, though.
I'm hoping to find an alternative for friends and family who still have the 5X - it's been dropped from Google's security updates for a while, because their support ends abysmally quickly.
More on topic, the LineageOS support requires a volunteer maintaining a buildable tree for the phone, and testing will require the hardware itself. I'm not sure how much CI/CD helps here.
The Nexus 5X supposedly has a maintainer with LineageOS, but maybe they're busy or no longer own the phone.
That's the great thing about open source! People form groups and spend their own time/resources to build what they want instead of waiting around for the corporate big brother to build it.
You aren't donating - any more than you're "donating" to Comcast when you pay your cable bill.
On the Comcast side, they can get fucked. My whole city pays them a crazy high fee for internet and more a month with very little improvements being made in infrastructure. Sure they now a have a remote with voice commands, but I and most people I know are almost never near the advertised speeds. At least the latency is good.
There is no fiduciary requirement to put profits above all else. In fact there is no fiduciary duty to make profits, just basically to do what's best for the company. There is no short term time frame listed. If there is a requirement to make profits it's not because it's a responsibility. Shareholders may want it but no one gets punished if a bad decision for the long term success of the company doesn't pan out. There's numberous examples of CEOs that attempted to pivot when it wasn't the most profitable course of events and then receiving a nice severance more than most employees make in a lifetime of work for failing.
You encourage what you measure against
Knowing what to measure against is harder the higher you go up the corporate ladder.
Incentives get skewed towards short term employees and short term rewards. Companies treating their employees as resources has only hurt loyalty. No one starts at a company in the US anymore unless they're average or below workers. The whole idea of companies not being willing to pay existing employees what they would pay a new hire is stupid too. You're willing to pay more for someone you're going to have to train and is a literal risk, versus a known commodity with known output. Generally you pay more for stability on the market not less.