> upstream projects anyways so any distro can just work
This may never end up working like that, considering how complicated installation is, comparatively speaking, and how macOS is still pretty much required to be installed.
You can make the Linux installation on Apple Sillicon Macs pretty painless nowadays. One terminal command on macOS, reboot to Linux, run one script - voila.
The Asahi installer can set up a standard UEFI environment on the Mac and you're off to the races from there.
The problem right now is more that you then need to use a patched kernel+mesa+others to do much with that environment. As more and more of those patches make it upstream, the process will converge to being a standard ARM64 install from the distro's point of view.
This may never end up working like that, considering how complicated installation is, comparatively speaking, and how macOS is still pretty much required to be installed.