Which leads to things like laptop sleep working inconsistently. Instead of having a good reputation, Linux's reputation gets hurt by all the random devices it allegedly supports.

Imagine if Apple had this same mentality, they would never be where they are.

(/s in case it is needed.)

As a smaller project, choosing a small set of hardware and supporting it really well (aside from security reasons) seems like a much better strategy than supporting tens of devices badly (go to e.g. the /e/OS forums to see what regressions people are dealing with after monthly updates).