But there's no money in making a consumer Linux OS. The market has shown this time and again. ChromeOS is effectively a loss leader, getting consumers and students into the Google ecosystem. MacOS is what you get if you want Apple hardware. That's about it for consumer oriented desktop/laptop *nix operating systems today.
So if there's no money in something, then the only people who will show up to work on it are going to want to scratch their own itches because it's a hobby and fun/interesting to them.
Android shouldn't be a loss leader at this point, though maybe it is in certain companies, and it's not exactly what most people think of when they think GNU/Linux.
Steam Deck is only being successful by translating Windows on top of Linux.
Valve failed to convince any major number of studios to bother about GNU/Linux, even when it would be relatively easy to port their games from Android NDK.
So if there's no money in something, then the only people who will show up to work on it are going to want to scratch their own itches because it's a hobby and fun/interesting to them.