I don’t think it is a moat, just stating the simple case.
I’ve spent a lot of time making cross-compile work for complicated builds. It can be tedious and frustrating fighting compilers and build systems to get it right.
Sometimes it is necessary because the target didn’t have a complete native toolchain, but other times because the target was just so incredibly slow for large builds.
I haven’t built anything with them, but these Arm servers appear to be neither of those two cases.
I doubt it's that hard if you're using a language with a reasonable cross-compile toolchain. That will probably influence choice of technology for new things aimed at this kind of performance envelope.
No doubt a lot of existing software will be left out by cross-compilation being too much of a pain.
If you use a modern gitops CI/CD type workflow building containers automatically then you don't need to worry about the manual building part either - this can be done cleanly with automation
They're clearly putting a hundred-mile moat between them and cross-compilation from the start :D
I wonder what their support stance will be when confronted with customer cross-compile scenarios.