My pet theory is that we can thank Chromebooks and SBCs like the Raspberry Pi. About 5 years ago, my preferred development machine was a 10" Chromebook with Crouton. The project gave you a full Linux chroot environment with shells and X windows surfaced as ChromeOS browser tabs.
I loved it. I could run EDA tools while sitting in the middle of the woods, and the battery would always outlast the sun. It was tiny and light enough to fit in an inside pocket. And I never felt nervous taking them anywhere, because I could write a few of them off for the price of a "real" laptop.
The only hurdle was the ARM SoCs. You could only run software that you could build from source, because almost nobody built proprietary applications for ARM ISAs. But the relevant tooling saw a lot of development and improvement during that time period, because suddenly a lot of people were giving them a workout.
So 5 years ago, you still needed a backup x86/64 machine for proprietary applications. But the myriad benefits were clear, and I'm glad to see that these power-sipping RISC chips might finally get their day.
And if you think this is exciting, just wait until more people start making RISC-V SoCs on modern process nodes!