A lot of BIOS/UEFI/ACPI hate comes X86, where ACPI is used from everything from suspending devices to reading buttons and setting leds. So when X86 kernel suspends, it does magic calls to ACPI and prays that the firmware vendor did not screw it up. Now vendors do screw up, hence lots of cursing and ugly workarounds in the kernel follows. My Lenovo has a firwmare bug where the FN-buttons and Fan stops working if the laptop is attached on AC adapter for too long. The fan is probably a simple i2c device the kernel could control directly without jumping through ACPI hiding layer hoops. But the X86 people hold the view it is better to trust the firmware engineer to control devices instead of having the kernel folk to write device drivers to ... control devices!
Now on ARM(64) the idea of using ACPI is to have none of that.
Instead the idea is to use ACPI only to provide tables for enumerating what devices are available in the platform. Just like what device tree does. Now if this is the same as device tree, why bother?
The main reason is to allow the distribution installer behave same on X86 / ARM / ARM64. This is crucial for distributions like fedora and RHEL where a cabal holds the point of view that X86 distribution development must not be constrained by ARM support. But it also important for everyone that the method of installing your favorite distribution to an ARM64 server is standard and works the same for any server from any vendor. Now while UEFI and ACPI are definitely not my preferred solutions, I can accept them as necessary evil for having a more standard platform.
