I don’t know much about hacking, but it’s surprising to me that there’s not a way to get around this. What stops people from developing a forced workaround? What would need to be done to develop one?

Edit: Answering my own question, sort of, it seems that a locked bootloader uses cryptographic keys stored on the device, so the problem becomes a typical key brute forcing scenario. What a mess. It’s so annoying that there aren’t more “touchscreen handheld computers” where you can just install whatever you want on them the same as building your own PC. I hate how everything like that is being chipped away over time.

Stuff like this seems promising though in a very far-out, push-comes-to-shove kind of way: https://www.synacktiv.com/en/publications/how-to-voltage-fault-injection#protect