That seems like the right choice. Specs exist for a reason. If you don't follow them, there is no reason your device should work. To adapt the world to work around your mistakes is insanity.
That said, there are often latent bugs in these situations that this sort of research/experimentation can uncover. Manufacturers would do well to invest the time in understanding why it doesn't work because those reasons can often lead to problems that are hard to catch when it is working.
"the Pi has problems with cache coherency on the PCI Express bus beyond 32-bits. And many (well, all nowadays) of the drivers expect that to function."
Yeah, that's a problem.
"there were issues with the BAR (Base Address Register) space allocated on the Pi's OS."
From the GitHub link:
# The default BAR address space available on the CM4 may be too small to allow # some devices to initialize correctly. To avoid 'failed to assign memory'
These don't look like implementation quirks, they are just flat-out errors.
Where are you getting your data?
I didn't mean to say anything against Linux nor imply that current Windows supports more hardware than current Linux.
I'm saying that one of the reasons Windows is so ubiquitous (on desktops) today is that in the 80s and 90s (during the "desktop wars") Windows computers supported a much wider range of hardware. Especially more than Mac OS who was their main competitor. Users could plug in ISA cards, PCI cards, serial printers, and a bunch of other things and most of the time it would work. The majority of users chose the OS that supported the expensive hardware they already had, and the rest is history.
Similarly: I agree with the statement "One could even argue that being tolerant of shitty hardware is one of the reasons that allowed Linux to become popular" and think it puts Linux in a position to continue to move forward in to the same sort of success that Windows had in the "desktop wars".