Having used a ton of vendor Linux BSPs over the years, I can say that often they’re not trying to lock you in to a particular approach when they describe how to

Having used a ton of vendor Linux BSPs over the years, I can say that often they’re not trying to lock you in to a particular approach when they describe how to EG blink an led. Rather they’re demonstrating that it can be done somehow. Every vendor expects you to take their demo code, evaluate it, and make decisions on your own to get to a working system. I’ve seen a lot of employers get into trouble over the years by shipping the vendor’s code unmodified. Even for LED blinking I might use the vendor’s code as a jumping off point and use the LED subsystem to implement different blink rates. But if I’m using EG a TI AM3359 I might want to go the direct register route instead of the LED is used by the real time coprocessor instead in my application. Usually more hands-on distributors like Arrow have Application Support Engineers who can advise for a particular board so you’re not stuck crawling vendor message boards for advice.