This does not match my experience unless you buy them day-and-date of release from a manufacturer who's slow to upstream system definitions. In my house I've got Rock64s, Orange Pi 3 LTSes, and just got an Orange Pi 5 (which stretches the definition of "SBC" in a lot of ways), along with a couple RPi3's and RPi4's. All have excellent Armbian support and, once you have Armbian installed, it's a bog-standard system.
They're also smaller, use less power, and tend to be less noisy. You trade off PCIe for most of them, granted, but more and more stuff is just "and I need a USB host over here" and for that they're excellent.
They're also smaller, use less power, and tend to be less noisy. You trade off PCIe for most of them, granted, but more and more stuff is just "and I need a USB host over here" and for that they're excellent.