I don't think access to SoC documentation would have solved very many of the problems described in the article. The author still would have had to fiddle with

I don't think access to SoC documentation would have solved very many of the problems described in the article. The author still would have had to fiddle with device trees, secure firmware, u-boot, pxeboot, and getting a kernel with the right drivers built in. RISC-V also doesn't solve SoC documentation access. Most of Arm's CPU documentation is freely available, its all the other stuff SoC vendors bolt on that's hard to get access to. I don't see RISC-V changing that.