So, I agree but less than I did a few months ago. I purchased an Orange Pi 5 Ultra and was put off by the pre-built image and custom kernel. The “patch“ for the provided kernel was inscrutable as well. Now I’m running a vanilla 6.18 kernel on a vanilla uboot firmware (still a binary blob required to build that though) with a vanilla install of Debian. That support includes the NPU, GPU, 2.5G Ethernet and NVMe root/boot. I don’t have performance numbers but it’s definitely fast enough for what I use it for.