They weren't discouraged because it was an almost entirely unique product in the market at the time. It was Raspberry Pi or nothing. Demand for such a product was obviously huge (even bigger than RPi anticipated), so with no other options in the market, all the weight was put behind RPi by default. Something new today would need to siphon away a bunch of the RPi community to get the same momentum, and that seems unlikely because for the most part RPi treats the community pretty well. Aside from the shortages and allocation strategies, they do a great job of having polished solutions with software that works well and keeps getting updated.

Maybe I'm remember incorrectly but I was in middleschool when the RPI 1 came out and my dad got me one.

There was tons of guides, tutorials, etc. when I got it, which I think was close to launch? The os image was already made, tutorials on how to set it up, use ssh, setup a basic webserver, etc were all there at or very near launch.

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Software support is almost never an issue for sbc's, and because they run linux, there's a significant amount of resources of how to use them.

Usually they fall apart because they don't have on-going software/firmware support the way RPI has always had a very well supported, and up-to-date linux image ready to flash.

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Although I will admit I think far more packages were compiled for arm back then compared to riscv packages today.

This has not been my experience. Straying from RPi has each time left me dependent on community forums and stuff just to get stuff working, and a couple of times has left me with a completely dead device and no ideas how to proceed