Have a look at the kernel >5.x.y organization. Overlays were a necessary result of every manufacture spinning their own board variant with standard cores and g

Have a look at the kernel >5.x.y organization. Overlays were a necessary result of every manufacture spinning their own board variant with standard cores and generic drivers. i.e. to bring up the hardware a generic monolith kernel would need to balloon in complexity, and could still mishandle ambiguous module setup etc. It is a kludge for sure, but a necessary one in the current ecosystem. =3