I never understood what Libreboot does on top of Coreboot. As far as I could tell it's a "distro" of Coreboot that just disables some things and maybe adds a few patches.
- Release engineering and testing. When Libreboot started, upstream coreboot wasn't doing releases at all; now they are, but they're still not suitable for end-users who want to use stable tested software: "Our releases aren’t primarily a vehicle for code that is stable across all boards"[0]. Downstream distributions that test on a specific range of devices (such as Libreboot, mrchromebox.tech, and vendors such as Chromebooks, Purism, System 76, ...) are still important to the ecosystem to provide stable releases. In the words of a coreboot dev: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33997880
- Pre-compiled and tested binaries, because lots of users aren't set up to build their own.
- A distribution of tools for more easily installing them than a sequence of long `flashram` incantations.
- Loads of documentation.
- Pre-configuration of common payloads, such as GRUB or SeaBIOS.
And let's not forget that the Libreboot project does contribute to upstream coreboot.
Not really. Whoever created these distros had a specific vision they wanted to achieve. Debian is one thing, Arch is another. The world is richer for having both.
Debian and Arch are different enough that the argument isn't about them. The issue is the 100's of distros that could be replaced with just "install <major distro> and do apt install X" (or some other trivial thing like changing the default to KDE instead of Gnome).
You can also replace that with "just install Windows", or "just use macOS".
Hell, you use this for anything; "why make a new album, movie, or book when there are already thousands upon thousands of them? Yours probably isn't any better!"
90% of distros' "visions" is ultimately just providing a general-purpose desktop/laptop OS. There's indeed an insane amount of wasted effort, both on developers' part but also users (skill portability is an issue because no 2 Linux distros/machines are alike).
I would argue that those are either similar enough to not be wasteful or dissimilar enough to not be redundant. Lubuntu is just Ubuntu with some minor differences in default packages and configs; there's not enough difference there to be wasteful. OTOH, Ubuntu, at least for a long time, was genuinely much more friendly to beginners than Debian, partially just because they could get patches in faster, and partially because they had a looser standard around non-free packages. There was divergence but for a good reason, and the projects have largely collaborated over the years so that the source code changes are shared where sensible but they target slightly different audiences with different support systems. Well, there's also Canonical just being Canonical but there's no way to solve that.
- Release engineering and testing. When Libreboot started, upstream coreboot wasn't doing releases at all; now they are, but they're still not suitable for end-users who want to use stable tested software: "Our releases aren’t primarily a vehicle for code that is stable across all boards"[0]. Downstream distributions that test on a specific range of devices (such as Libreboot, mrchromebox.tech, and vendors such as Chromebooks, Purism, System 76, ...) are still important to the ecosystem to provide stable releases. In the words of a coreboot dev: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33997880
- Pre-compiled and tested binaries, because lots of users aren't set up to build their own.
- A distribution of tools for more easily installing them than a sequence of long `flashram` incantations.
- Loads of documentation.
- Pre-configuration of common payloads, such as GRUB or SeaBIOS.
And let's not forget that the Libreboot project does contribute to upstream coreboot.
[0]: https://doc.coreboot.org/releases/checklist.html#purpose-of-...