one of the reasons that BSDs are less popular is because of the community advice of "The best supported machine is a ten + year old thinkpad."

so yeah you're right there isn't a finish line, but you do need to keep up with current stuff enough to give a possible fan base a decent selection of hardware to run the thing on.

in other words : if the companies that the BSDs already had a hard time keeping up with hasten development via LLMs the gap will grow ever wider until a critical point is hit and the thing becomes irrelevant.

if linux is the only show in town that supports flashy-hardware-Z then it's going to drive audience migration.

the thing that has allowed openbsd to adopt new things so slowly is a rock-solid set of core competencies; the amount that bsd is entrenched into the internet itself makes irrelevance hard to imagine -- but it's still a facet.

I still hear people bitch that BSDs don't support WiFi, and that hasn't been true in years and years.