Most laptops are more or less in the same situation as M1. Maybe they different quantitatively, but not qualitatively: devices do not have (sufficient) specs available and people need to reverse engineer them if you want to run any free OS on them. Yet people want to do that and often manage. Why is M1 different?

What I really would like to see is hardware manufacturers (Apple and anybody else) releasing the specs, so that people are free to do whatever they want with the metal they buy. I might event consider appropriate a legislative intervention in this field.