Good point, I forgot A64 laptops are already widely available! I only worked with old ARM chips and remember that the instruction endianness and the thumb mode

Good point, I forgot A64 laptops are already widely available! I only worked with old ARM chips and remember that the instruction endianness and the thumb mode were particularly nasty, so maybe this is the reason I didn't like it :) But most other tools do need to support everything. E.g. the IAR debugger I used really didn't like the thumb mode. But somebody still had to implement it either way -- that time could have been spent on improving other parts of the debugger.