RISC-V is the ARM mess taken to extremes. From TFA:

  It’s a crapshoot. That’s why whenever anyone recommends a certain cool Arm motherboard or mini PC, the first thing you have to figure out is what its software support situation is like. Does the OEM provide blessed Linux images? If so, do they offer more than an outdated Ubuntu build? Have they made any update promises?

Almost every ARM board I've got is running ancient kernel images that were out of date even when they were released and haven't got any newer since then, but that's positively great compared to the RISC-V situation where you feel like you're taking your life into your hands every time you try and update it. The last update I did, to a popular widely-used board, took close to a full day to progressively reflash different levels of boot loaders and kernel images and whatnot, repartition the MTD for each reflash, hack around hardware and boot params via the serial interface through trial-and-error, and slowly work my way up to a current already out-of-date firmware and kernel config.

I really hate to like x86 but I know that when I set up an embedded x86 device it's flash, apt-get update/upgrade, and I've got the latest stuff running and supported.