Everything's relative. Sure, the BIOS whitelist is a serious mark in the "bad" column. In the "good" column, my daily driver is a Frankenpad made from a T480 with the 7-row keyboard from a T25, the 500 nit screen and glass touchpad from an X1 Carbon gen 6, a 2TB SSD upgrade, a 32GB RAM upgrade (two slots! I could even have had 64) and a magnesium lid for kicks. There is no other laptop brand with this many options for slicing, dicing, and upgrading in this fashion.
Is this modularity mostly an incidental side effect of part reuse and corporate serviceability for Lenovo's benefit rather than ours? Sure. But hacking isn't always about what things were designed to do - it's about what they can do.
Aside from sourcing the parts, the screen part was actually harder: this combination of screen, lid, and webcam is not officially supported, so the drilling and hacking I had to do for that was not documented. Unfortunately the foam tape I used to brace the screen in the correct left-right position seems to have slipped, as the screen is no longer properly centered... oh well!
Is this modularity mostly an incidental side effect of part reuse and corporate serviceability for Lenovo's benefit rather than ours? Sure. But hacking isn't always about what things were designed to do - it's about what they can do.