Selfhosted

Where I work I bump into them all over - including in security systems and door-access.

Yes and like me you're perfectly capable of changing a default password / using SSH keys for those critical use cases. People who use them for serious things also know how to properly handle security and in the other cases security isn't required at the level they pushing for. A simple "change password on first login" was enought.

What’s not equally serious with banana pi is support. I went to their wiki, it lists Android and Debian (previous version) “images” but no download links, so it’s hard for me to verify that this board boots with sshd running or not

https://www.armbian.com/download/?device_support=Standard%20support&arch=aarch64

In case you aren't aware the Banana Pi are a platinum member of Armbian and they provide money, code and general support to the project and actively tell people to use Armbian is they don't want Android. They also the the same with OpenWRT for specific models. This is true open-source collaboration, not what the Pi Foundation does, and leads to long term, well supported boards with kernel updated and paid support for enterprise customers. And why isn't the Pi Foundation also contributing to Armbian? Simple, they want to keep things for themselfs.

Making things easier for you Armbian are builds of Debian or Ubuntu with tweaks for SD cards, low level device tree overlays, kernel tweaks and everything required to have a barebones Debian system for SBCs.

The telemetry is bad news - soon we will be out of food because someone knows what size of sd-cards you use, and the number of installs you do. So better go buys a silly board, track down some ancient image of an install someone did at some point where they managed to compile the nic drivers and include the binary blob. Because nobody gets to force you to add an empty file to your sd-card!

The Pi is better in education, hobbyists and people who aren’t that proficient with electronics and computers however it opens the door to a lot of potencial market abuse, Apple-style ecosystems and whatnot. At the end of the day it is overpriced and it isn’t really good at anything - not even in ethics - as specialized options in those niches (ESP32, Arduino, Other SBCs, MiniPCs…) are better for said use cases. It looks a lot like the Pi Foundation knows about this market-fit issue and is just trying to push more and more stuff into the hobbits as a way to keep growing and making money. The SSH/telemetry/app bundle thing isn’t objectively bad alone, but people aren’t complaining and it is just opening the door to a LOT of more custom stuff and eventually a closer ecosystem and a situation like Chrome market dominance.

What the next step for them? A cloud service that you need to use / pay to develop stuff for the Pi? :)