I can buy a smartphone or tablet that's 100% unlockable and has all the bells and whistles right now, and get it delivered in 24 hours, and not pay significantly more than average.

I think the market is working just fine. (To which people usually say "for now". Well yeah, the sun hasn't gone supernova... for now)

Narrator's Narrator: "The overwhelming majority of consumers don't care about the bootloader, so the market forces do not have an incentive to keep it unlocked. This leads to the market not 'fixing itselt'. "

if the market is not solving the problem then the natural conclusion is that it is not a problem that needs solving, pretty sad about it that not that many people care about these things.

The opposite is pretty much true when it comes to security I am generally forced to use an apple device since I can be relatively sure that my keys will be safe (not including state sponsored actors, at that point I would have bigger problems).

Now something for the market to actually solve would be poor hardware security in general making locked bootloaders serve no purpose, having strong built-in security at the SOC would diminish the advantages gained with locked down systems and would allow us to have BYOK without compromising on the general populations security.