People take so much for granted. It was decades until the graphics cards manufacturers ever saw Linux support as a serious issue. Linux made itself a serious platform by this kind of "wasted effort" and if you go even earlier in the history of Linux, it itself was maintained by enthousiasts that many considered "wasted effort" because Linux was an amateur operating system that was never going to have vendor support or even run production grade software.

Cynics are gonna cynic. But it's people like Asahi that get shit done and move the world forward.