To be fair, if it's only for hardware bring up then I would kind of expect it to to be hacked together without any regard for things you care about in a "real" distro. (Heavily patched kernel? Who cares, we're not going to update it. Can't self-host? Whatever, cross compile the whole thing. Software leaks memory? No problem, just reboot the test rig hourly. Broken package manager? We can build+flash a new image every time we want to change the installed software.)

> in contrast to asahi which is bending over backwards to do things right

Not having to reverse engineer drivers for pretty much every single component would probably require a fraction of the effort though. And it's not like Apple would really need to actually maintain their own distro, releasing the drivers (which they are more than capabable of doing) would be perfectly sufficient.