Yes, and if they have done the hard work to deliver features in the kernel that provide a moat, that blob is the hardware.

Reversing and reimplementing the closed bits are what I want my Buildroot pipelines to do.

That’s my use case though; targeting COTS devices with (mainline) Linux support that don’t do all they could.

I have done it the ugly way (in production) and I want elegance in my old age.