This is not totally true as there was a number of WeTek devices supported and also the Odroid C2.
As above, these existed already.
This is not totally true, when LE received a “donation” from WeTek for adding support for WeTek devices they didn’t care about mainline when money and hardware was involved.
Mainline is not the be all and end all and answer to all the problems that exist like they would have you believe, you only have to look at how many times patches have been applied each time they bump the Linux kernel to a new main version, it also will not be feature complete in time for Kodi 19 in my opinion.
I think the decisions they are taking is a positive thing though in my opinion, it just means more users will come this way and I genuinely believe users will be better served with CoreELEC and I don’t just say that as a contributor and one of it’s creators but because our support is solely focused on only Amlogic, our user numbers are growing day by day.