This is a narrow view. There are more operating systems out there than just Linux. Standardizing peripherals the ways PCs have done would have many benefits. Device tree basically forces operating systems to need per board images instead of a generic image that works on most boards. This doesn't scale well, especially on operating systems without a stable driver abi.
There's nothing about device tree which forces this. It's just how it's normally used because of said constraints. The ideal device tree situation would be it is provided by the SBC vendor and then passed into the generic image, just like ACPI. The reason this isn't done is this generic image doesn't exist at the moment. Switching to ACPI still means this generic image doesn't exist.
It's the reverse. DTs allow having a common image, where just the DT differs (and can be selected on boot, or passed from FW if it's not part of the OS image).
> Standardizing peripherals the ways PCs have done would have many benefits.
So, Linux's implementation would work well, whilst Windows has to pretend to be Linux in order to have it work mostly kinda unless the device explicitly supported Windows?
