Yeah, I don't think "surely no one seriously believes this" is viable now, if it was before. Of course, what you choose to do with that conclusion is still up to you.
As someone that have successfully flown a RPi CM4 based payload on a cubesat, I fully agree with this. There's not enough funding in my research group to hire a dedicated test engineer so I need to both design and test my payload. It was a long lonely road
It does work at the end, but shortly after we got our first data from space, I decided to quit the space industry and become a test engineer at a terrestrial embedded company instead
Its not your normal soda-lime glass, its more of a glass-ceramic material that have very low coefficient of thermal expansion, something like zerodur: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zerodur , which means it can keep its shape and focus even under varying temperature
As much as I want to fly with Chinese rocket to encourage launcher competition and redundancy, export controls prevent me from doing that.