So the embedded world ends needing a ton of that, but most 'big' vendors end up having a team that builds effectively one-off products from some vendors 'board

So the embedded world ends needing a ton of that, but most 'big' vendors end up having a team that builds effectively one-off products from some vendors 'board support package'/BSP. Thats also how many of the more popular SBC (aka nanopi/orangepi/pine64) vendor images actually exist. Its been a battle to work 'backwards' from those binary artifacts to reproducible source builds. Thats just in the device segment. For systems/integration vendors you'll find a Whole New World(TM) of vendors, vendor-specific-patches, and aftermarket-vendors that take what they can buy without a 'relationship' and try to build a product on top of that. Github is littered with repositories of bits of knowledge around those efferts. Once in awhile, some of these efforts get enough momentum/interest to get pulled into a community project or if they're really lucky an upstream tree. If you're not working with the lucky one though, you're basically working with 1000 disparate vendor source drops. Such is the embedded/specialty hardware lanscape these days. Pretty much every hardware vendor builds to a specific one-time deploy configuration for a customer. There might be a market for that sort of ops integration service, but if a startup pops up that knows how to deal with all the details, they tend to be bought out.