Great playback behaviour/performance with Kodi requires kernel, ffmpeg, and Kodi patches. The kernel patches are normally a mix of things that are already on upstream mailing lists and capabilities that are still work-in-progress. Over time LE accumulated several DRM maintainers and notable contributors as project staff, and we deliberately chat with folks from Collabora and Raspberry Pi who are involved with commercial work in the DRM/V4L2 ecosystem that overlaps with our needs: LE gains from their efforts to push code upstream and they benefit from LE/Kodi being media focussed so our devs/staff are good testers.
Our goal is to have zero Kodi patches (beyond basic distro packaging) but Kodi features for RPi currently depend on some kernel and ffmpeg capabilities which are not yet upstream, e.g. until the Red Hat sponsored 'HDR' working group met earlier this year the forward path for colorimetry and some related userspace bits were blocked pending decisions on how to implement; and as the ripple effects of agreement start to unblock things we are adapting and retooling where needed.
Upstreaming FFMpeg changes is the greatest challenge and we are mostly working through JC (who maintains ffmpeg and related things for Pi foundation) but the changes are often complex, the mailing list is opinionated, and the resulting merge rate is low so there's a large patch backlog. Kodi is using FFMpeg 6.0 currently and won't need to bump to 6.1 for a while, but I understand JC has now started work on that. One of the things we do for JC is test his branch over a range of SoC devices to ensure the changes for RPi don't break support for other SoC platforms (to help with upstreaming).
So as a general rule you should be able to pick and choose the media-related kernel patches LE has for Allwinner, Amlogic, Rockchip into a common 'arm64' codebase with FFMpeg 6.0 from JC and a few Kodi changes from LE. In our own codebase we still keep things a little separate to reduce interdependencies for individual SoC platform maintainers, but there are others that we chat with who are doing that; e.g. the developers behind MiniMyth (single image for all arm/arm64 devices) and Manjaro (similar..)