The best part of this is that, imagine tomorrow you want it running on ESP32 because out of the blue your board is now costly too much (this is just hypothetical: I'm for RP2040/50 for ALL uses but the most cheap requirements that need WiFi). Well, you can adapt it in 5 minutes.
I agree and that's going to be the biggest appeal: we can bury the HAL down into a library and you never have to deal with it again.
Adafruit did an incredible job putting all that abstraction across their products into a single "import board" statement.