One of the biggest challenges in running an open source hardware project like this is catering to two very different audiences: The majority of your customers (99.9% or more) just want the hardware to get up and running quickly so they can get to their specific need or application. They don’t want to have to read endless IRC or Discord backlogs to figure out the current best distribution to use or read potentially outdated half-finished Wiki articles describing the tradeoffs of various distros. They want it to work and to get started quickly.
The open-source developers have an entirely different set of desires, preferring endless tinkering with the internals and actually enjoying the process of trying different distributions, building and testing bleeding-edge board support software themselves, playing in someone’s experimental fit branch to get one thing working, and other time-consuming activities relayed to the board itself.
If you let a project cater too much to the developer community at the expense of the 99.9% customers, it starts to become a huge problem.
For the best example, consider the huge success of the Raspberry Pi and their Raspberry Pi OS, while even the biggest competitors (such as PINE64) remain relegated to mostly obscurity. The hard truth is that if you want to make a product like this successful and mainstream, you need to narrow the focus and be ruthless about cutting costs, simplifying, and getting your users up and running with one easy, primary way to get started. I have several Pine64 products and they all suffer massively from the fragmentation and compromises they’ve made. Fun if you’re a kernel developer who spends tens of hours every week keeping up with your friends in the small developer community. Not fun at all if you just wanted to use the product for something and you realize you could spend weeks or months sorting through all of the disparate information sources and developer communities before you can have the product working enough to get started on that thing you actually wanted to build with it.
Pine64 is making enthusiast products for hackers, not mass-market devices for non-hackers. Non-hackers have access to plenty of phones which just werk. Part of the promise of Pine's platform and the appeal to the target audience is the commitment to community.
Sounds like either Pine64 has grown past this and decided to pivot, or has been losing revenue due to a lack of customers from this niche market. Personally, as a hacker I love playing with different OSes. However, if I was to use any open source device like a PinePhone or Pine64 board to build something, I'd prefer a stable environment backed by an established foundation. Environment setup is hell, and figuring out which open-source OS works best, if it will be supported in the future, and how to install it would slow me down immensely.