It sometimes makes sense to made a distro that is specifically for new or unusual hardware.
I point to Asahi Linux, supporting Apple computers based on their M1, M2 and M3 ARM cpus is a load of work that is still in progress and sometimes issues are only found when a load of people use it. Eventually the source code that has been written or modified to support Apples relatively-new hardware will reach mainstream distros so people can run Debian, Ubuntu, Redhat etc on an M1 mac with working sound, gpu etc.
If some new RISC-V single board computer reaches the market it might make sense for someone to make a distro specifically for it.
A distro for specific hardware may get better performance by being compiled to use the specific instruction set and cpu features.
I point to Asahi Linux, supporting Apple computers based on their M1, M2 and M3 ARM cpus is a load of work that is still in progress and sometimes issues are only found when a load of people use it. Eventually the source code that has been written or modified to support Apples relatively-new hardware will reach mainstream distros so people can run Debian, Ubuntu, Redhat etc on an M1 mac with working sound, gpu etc.
If some new RISC-V single board computer reaches the market it might make sense for someone to make a distro specifically for it.
A distro for specific hardware may get better performance by being compiled to use the specific instruction set and cpu features.