Furthermore I'm hesitant to rely too much on the arm ecosystem in general. If one pops a drive with a Linux installation into any amd64 machine, it straightforwardly boots. Whereas just making an arm device boot can be its own tinkering session of figuring out its own bespoke partitioning scheme, firmware files, and U-boot image. Many times you're stuck using a non-mainline kernel since that's what the embedded developers hacked on to get something running. Devicetree compiler what? And sure, using a purpose-built distro can hide much of the complexity, until that distro decides your device is too old and drops support.
Heck, I've even moved my wifi AP's over to low power amd64 machines instead of the popular answer of OpenWRT/DD-WRT. When I want to upgrade to a new wifi standard, I'll just pop in a new wireless card. The same machines also run Kodi for the TVs (which used to be separate RPis).