But Microsoft didn't do that. Hardware industry did: ISA PnP, PCI, USB. Those are all hardware standards.
ARM devices are embedded in the SoC. That's basically the definition of a SoC. Intel & co. at that time didn't produce SoCs. A CPU was just a CPU. It didn't have UARTs, GPU, SDHCI, I2c, SPI and other stuff in it.
The only thing x86 (basically Intel, not Microsoft) did good was to standardize I/O addresses like framebuffer, IDE ports, serial I/O and later to make the rest discoverable via ACPI standard (which is a bad standard, btw, and UEFI is far worse).
You may view ACPI as the x86 devicetree. The only difference is that x86 comes with ACPI written in a chip, while ARM firmware is a separate file you add into your bootable image next to the kernel, without the need for a separate EEPROM chip.
You shouldn't be complaining about the ARM device descovery (devicetree), but about the absolute jungle of devices that ARM includes. Just think how many different USB controllers are out there. Each manufacturer designed it's own controller and every ARM chip needs a different driver. On x86 there are/were only 2: Intel (UHCI) and AMD (OHCI), and then they cooperated and made universal EHCI and xHCI.
ARM devices are embedded in the SoC. That's basically the definition of a SoC. Intel & co. at that time didn't produce SoCs. A CPU was just a CPU. It didn't have UARTs, GPU, SDHCI, I2c, SPI and other stuff in it.
The only thing x86 (basically Intel, not Microsoft) did good was to standardize I/O addresses like framebuffer, IDE ports, serial I/O and later to make the rest discoverable via ACPI standard (which is a bad standard, btw, and UEFI is far worse).
You may view ACPI as the x86 devicetree. The only difference is that x86 comes with ACPI written in a chip, while ARM firmware is a separate file you add into your bootable image next to the kernel, without the need for a separate EEPROM chip.
You shouldn't be complaining about the ARM device descovery (devicetree), but about the absolute jungle of devices that ARM includes. Just think how many different USB controllers are out there. Each manufacturer designed it's own controller and every ARM chip needs a different driver. On x86 there are/were only 2: Intel (UHCI) and AMD (OHCI), and then they cooperated and made universal EHCI and xHCI.