I just did this and was able to recover closer to 100MB (now have 128MB available)... still a great improvement. Boot times don't appear to be impacted, though compression is slower (almost 3-4x slower).

In general, I think it is a positive thing as it brings Pop!_OS to more users and thus increases the chances of gaining new contributions.

For instance, I run Pop on 4 non-System76 devices and because I enjoy the distribution so much, I've contributed a few fixes to the distribution. If Pop didn't work well on most non-System76 hardware, I would not have used it nor would I have contributed to it.

Moreover, I actually do contribute financially to System76 by donating here: https://pop.system76.com/. You can provide a monthly donation directly to System76 for Pop if you wish.

Additionally, most (x86_64) hardware is not that different and a lot of bugs/issues occur at a layer above the actual hardware differences. For example, there was a bug in how bluetooth was handled during suspend and resume a year or so ago. This impacted both System76 machines and non-System76 machines and a few of the contributors to the eventual fix (including myself) helped debug and implement a fix despite not running System76 hardware.

Finally, because of how well Pop works and the interaction of the developers and the community I am more likely to purchase a System 76 device for my next machine (hoping the new Virgo is as amazing as the teasers have been hinting at).