Personally, I use an RPi4 with libreelec, and it works great - including responding to my remote via HDMI-CEC. (There's also no need for any sysadmin with libreelec, which is designed to work out of the box.)
Yes, it "just works". Why wouldn't it?
You must realize there are things like 3blue1brown, Veritasium, and Numberphile on YouTube, right?