Two HUGE roadblocks were self-inflicted: adopting a hardware platform that doesn't care about external development (Apple silicon) and a programming language that has almost zero support in the Linux kernel (being the first ever to try to achieve multilanguage Linux kernel development).
The odds were set against the Asahi Linux project from the beginning.
Totally—on the hardware platform piece, I've owned Macs since the 90s, first installed Linux on one in like 2003ish, tried it on all of my various Macs since at some point, but switched to a desktop Linux machine full time in 2020. I'm generally not one to crap on ambition, but Linux is just so much more enjoyable on hardware that isn't totally closed/undocumented/hostile/unsupported by the manufacturer. With the Macs there was just always something slightly unsupported, regularly broken by updates, or otherwise not quite right, and that was before the architecture switch.
Apple makes great hardware (I have an M1 laptop I use away from home), but if I'm intending to run Linux as my primary OS, I'm buying from a company that is more open to it.
The odds were set against the Asahi Linux project from the beginning.