...because that means there's a lot of support and documentation for that 1 variant and lots of people have solved problems and written about it,
This is like the iPhone strategy against Nokia. When I worked at Nokia it produced many variant phones - each with a little more ram or a bit less or a better screen or a different chipset. This was because they thought that people bought on price and wanted to have a product at every price point.
The builds took more than a week to finish, the bug fixing was horrendous. The software sometimes had to work with not enough RAM sometimes with different chipset bugs, different graphics limitations. It was a nightmare to produce a quality product. Then out of e.g. 18 phone models we had to customise each one for 1000 operators in the world which intensified the pain and effort.
At that time Apple had one iPhone. It was over specified - lots of RAM, great graphics etc. They only had to test their code once - not 18 times.
The ESP8266 and ESP32 from what I've seen have got far more documentation and support (also due to library compatibility between the two chips).
I've personally not come across any lack of documentation or compatibility issues, which I guess only happens if you need to target many versions of a chip, which isn't a problem for most people unless you're an API developer.
Making software for all those models was exhausting. It took an entire team just to profile phones and make configurations for compilers (what is the screen resolution? does it have feature x? is there a physical keyboard, and how many buttons does it have? where are the crucial buttons located? ...), and then you ended up with hundreds of targets taking days or weeks to make a build. I know many programmers that quit the industry altogether during those times.
This is like the iPhone strategy against Nokia. When I worked at Nokia it produced many variant phones - each with a little more ram or a bit less or a better screen or a different chipset. This was because they thought that people bought on price and wanted to have a product at every price point.
The builds took more than a week to finish, the bug fixing was horrendous. The software sometimes had to work with not enough RAM sometimes with different chipset bugs, different graphics limitations. It was a nightmare to produce a quality product. Then out of e.g. 18 phone models we had to customise each one for 1000 operators in the world which intensified the pain and effort.
At that time Apple had one iPhone. It was over specified - lots of RAM, great graphics etc. They only had to test their code once - not 18 times.