I don't think RPi is the gold standard nor is Chinese production that strongly correlated with poor SW support?

Raspberry Pi usually requires customisation from the distro. This is mitigated by the fact that many distros have done that customisation but the platform itself is not well-designed for SW support.

Meanwhile many Allwinner and Rockchip platforms have great mainline support. While Qualcomm is apparently moving in the right direction but historically there have been lots of Qualcomm SBCs where the software support is just a BSP tarball on a fixed Linux kernel.

So yeah I do agree with your conclusion but it's not as simple as "RPi has the best software support and don't buy Chinese". You have to look into it on a case by case basis.