> As brilliant as this team is, and as much progress as they've made, fighting against a trillion-dollar corporation that can decide to shut it down at any moment is a sisyphean endeavor
Apple historically cares very little about Linux on Mac whereas it seems like you’re talking about the non-Mac product lines. Indeed, they go out of their way, if I recall correctly, to make it possible and easier in the first place.
I wouldn't describe leaving the bootloader unlocked as "going out of their way" to make all of this possible. Clearly, if just booting another kernel would be sufficient, running Linux on their machines should be easy. Yet none of this is. "Going out of their way" would at the very least be providing documentation and support so that reverse engineering their hardware wouldn't be necessary.
Also, what's not to say that they will decide to lock the bootloader just as they do on all their other devices? What does Apple practically gain by leaving it unlocked? If they're doing it as a gesture of good faith to their users, they're doing an awful job at it. Doing it so they can sell a negligible amount of machines to a niche group of hackers also doesn't make business sense.
Depending on the good will of a corporation that historically hasn't shown much of it to the hacker community is not a great idea.
The changes made were not as simple as not-setting a lock fuse bit. Making the bootloader unlockable in a way that didn't compromise their existing security model did require going out of their way. The status-quo for previous "apple silicon" bootchains (iphone, ipad, etc.) was not built this way.
Even T2 macs had no way to boot custom firmware on the T2 chip, without exploits.
Sure, they could've done way more, but evidently they'd rather not lock down the platform completely.
If they don't release that code to the public, what good does it do? (Also, if they are only doing a temporary in-house version for initial hardware work, they can do all kinds of ugly hacks that wouldn't really be good for upstream use any anyway.)
Apple historically cares very little about Linux on Mac whereas it seems like you’re talking about the non-Mac product lines. Indeed, they go out of their way, if I recall correctly, to make it possible and easier in the first place.