And now it's 10 years later and it clearly hasn't worked. Time to revisit old assumptions and learn something new.
Manufacturers ought to support their products for their full lifecycle instead of behaving like e-waste factories. If they're not happy about unstable kernel ABIs, they can start making Windows devices.
They also just combine many chips into their systems, and also get precompiled driver blobs.
You're asking the entire tech industry to change how they're doing things.
The reason no one has left Linus['s repo] in the dust is because no one has taken the effort to put out and maintain a general purpose API-standardised fork instead of heavily-customised, specific-to-their-own-business codebases.