Broadcom makes some good stuff now and then (Rpi’s)

The Broadcom SoCs used in the RPi's are not "good stuff" at all - they are one of the worst pieces of junk I have ever had the displeasure of using.

They are extremely unstable, and if you want any kind of moderately reliable deployment of an RPi, you need to use a watchdog timer to reset the device if it freezes. Except - guess what - the watchdog timer itself is broken on the RPi! (As of the last time I tried this, iirc with an RPi 4) Either it's busted in hardware or the driver is broken. Most semi-high-reliability devices built using RPis have elected to use external watchdogs, which is super annoying and would not be necessary on a correctly designed SoC.

Their clocking and boot schemes are also totally insane garbage, with random peripherals breaking if you change the GPU clock, and with the GPU silicon running the bootloader or something ridiculous like that.

I would prefer almost any other ARM SoC to the BCM used in the RPi.

It sounds as painful as making sure every card is in the culturally agreed slot with an Apple II.

And the lack of 3D accelerated video with rpi4. I wish I knew about these prior purchasing rpi. There is a good market for small form general purpose computer with 4g ram + decent gpu. I am still not sure if Intel’s NUC would worth a try in this category.

Isn't broadcom the worst part of the rpi? It's impossible to boot the pi without loading a binary blob backdoor first

How about the fact that Broadcom essentially enabled the Pi to be created in the first place?

Broadcom "enabled" the Pi to be created because the SoC for the original RPi 1 was a flop. They wanted to use it for Set Top Box (Cable TV, Google TV etc) devices but couldn't find any buyers

One of the engineers who worked on it worked out a deal with Broadcom to simply reuse the design and market it toward education instead

And it boots with the GPU which is not 3D accelerated in version 4 because the whole project was done by one person who just left. This is one of most popular SBCs out there. I wish it was a bit better.

Are there any high performance single-board computers on the market currently? I use a lot of Rpi's in personal projects, and I've been thinking about a home file server in a super small form-factor. What I would like is an SBC somewhere on the size scale of a smartphone, with performance in the range of a current flagship phone.

Does something like this exist?

This is exactly what I want too. What comes close is the Pine64 Pro.

Broadcom is neither the first nor only company making SoCs. The RPi people just happened to have someone working there.

Nobody said any of those things. The Rpi is good. Broadcom makes it.