This wasn’t during a development period
That’s false - the initial shipping announcement published in September 2019 estimated that the mass production batch will not be ready before Q2 2020, at which point the shipment of backorders was supposed to start. This eventually got delayed and Evergreen shipment only started in November 2020, and even then it got paused for a few months because of component shortage (see the chart at Estimate your Librem 5 shipping - #432 by spaetz ).