Purism marketed their phone as the eventual iPhone/Android killer. "Get the hardware, and the software will ripen with every update in your hand", was their claim. Purism created the hardware very slowly and worked on the software in-house themselves in a very "cathedral-esque" paradigm. Without hardware, you don't have passionate *unpaid volunteers* so stuff was slow and incomplete. Developers were also just pleading for something to hack on. Yes, they did some good things that are upstreamed in the kernel and elsewhere, credit where it's due, but it's beyond merciful to call this anything but a botched product.
Pine64 put their phone out relatively quickly for the devs. A weak, early and raw device with big warnings letting people know that this was a DEV DEVICE and it was not for general consumption. Pine created the hardware themselves, but not the software and just cultivated an ecosystem where they'd support and work with third-party software distributions. They even did cycle runs where they'd ship different logos and operating system on the device to support the community. This is the way.
I think people have good reason to call Purism out for their $1200-2000 Librem phones that have overheating issues and alpha-grade software, if they get delivered at all. There's no free pony here sure, but my $600 vapor pony wasn't free either.