You know why. Nobody wants to sysadmin their “friendly Linux distro” just to watch shows. Kodi is amateur hour compared to tvOS. Nowhere do people care more that it “just works” than the thing their TV remote talks to.
I literally bought a mini PC, installed Arch with KDE via archinstall, installed chromium, and haven't done any "sysadmin" since.
Yes, it "just works". Why wouldn't it?
Nobody in the general public wants to do that, but I'd think some in the HN audience might feel differently (I mean, setting this up is part of the fun).
Personally, I use an RPi4 with libreelec, and it works great - including responding to my remote via HDMI-CEC. (There's also no need for any sysadmin with libreelec, which is designed to work out of the box.)