Honestly a Framework+System76 merger would make a lot of sense. System76 cares about the software but uses whitelabeled hardware. Framework has done excellent hardware engineering but doesn't care much about the software.
To me, that's far from not caring about the software. Especially when you compare to other vendors like Pine.
What I probably should have said is that System76 takes open software ridiculously seriously in the same way that Framework takes open hardware ridiculously seriously. On the scale of Linux laptops, Framework is on par with Dell and Lenovo (the best of the big OEMs) in terms of upstreaming patches etc.
System76 OTOH is completely crazy. They've put Coreboot on their laptops, built their own DE because they got tired of Ubuntu not shipping proper nvidia drivers, etc.