As opposed to what hardware, then? Because this is pretty much how most other drivers became a thing in the first place. Linux has come a long way and due to it "winning the cloud" many hardware vendors started properly supporting it, but this was absolutely not the case for the longest times.
As for alternatives, there are many.
The efficiency of arm chips was never arm, really, it was the manufacturing node and SOC design. Well, Intel and AMD can make SOCs, and they do.
There are also older NVIDIA Orin SBCs with Cortex-A78, but those are severely overpriced, so they are not worthwhile, unless you really want to use them in an automotive project.
For software development, the Arm-designed cores have the advantage of excellent documentation, unlike the proprietary cores designed by Apple and Qualcomm, which are almost undocumented. Good documentation simplifies software debugging and tuning.
Unfortunately there are no cheap solutions for developing on the latest ARM ISA variants (except for a Chinese Armv9.2-A CPU, which has some quirks and is available in mini-ITX and smaller formats). For the latest ISA, you should develop software on a smartphone, e.g. on one of the Motorola smartphones that have DisplayPort for connecting an external monitor and a desktop mode for Android.
The most serious problem that I had was about 10 years ago in a Lenovo laptop with NVIDIA Optimus (i.e. where the NVIDIA GPU does not have direct video outputs, but it must pass through the Intel GPU). At that time, I spent a couple of days until succeeding to make NVIDIA Optimus work OK in Linux. With the Intel GPU, Linux worked fine since the beginning. This happened because at that time the Linux NVIDIA driver did not support Optimus, so you had to install a separate program to be able to select which GPU shall be used by an application. I do not know if any laptops with Optimus still exist today.
Except for that case, I never encountered any hardware compatibility problem that could not be solved in minutes or a few hours of most. For contrast, with Windows I have seen many problems that could not be solved in weeks, even with the assistance of IT support personnel from multiple continents, because nobody, not even the "professionals", had any idea about what Windows is really doing and what may be wrong.
It is true that some of the laptops that I have used had a few features that I have never used, so I do not know if they worked in Linux. For instance I have never used a fingerprint reader or a NFC reader.
