Dunno, the real complaint against exynos in favour of Qualcomm other than tribalism is that a lot of stuff was developed for Qualcomm with Adreno and not whatever GPU Exynos spouted at the time (custom weird thing early on, then PowerVR, nowadays Adreno). In USA they used Qualcomm due to CDMA shenanigans mainly.
Oh, and stuff like qualcomm-specific hacks people were used to from Jail broken HTC devices (like phone call recording) not working. Final minority complaint was essentially based on qualcomm devices being more popular so you had more resources for custom roms, despite the fact that Exynos meant no need to do complicated jailbreak to load a custom rom.
Personally I found no issue with Exynos chips whatsoever. Always some of the fastest stuff I had in my hands.
Most benchmarks showed Exynos falling behind in both performance and power effeciency for years. I don't know if this is still the case with the latest models, but many Exynos phones were also plain worse than their Qualcom counterparts.
Quite sad, really, because the space can use some competition.
That's very unfortunate. With their vertical integration, Samsung is one of the few companies that can actually compete with Apple if they can get the tech up to spec.
Can you source your claim that Exynos used weird GPUs? AFAIK, Exynos mostly used ARM Mali (the default for ARM chips) cores with the exception of the most recent iteration when they formed a partnership with AMD to use RDNA in the 2200 model. I am absolutely sure no Exynos chip ever used Adreno and I also think they never used PowerVR.
As for weird GPUs, the S3C2410 (which got renamed as Exynos post-factum) used weird Samsung-designed GPU (doubly weird because it was GLES2-only GPU yet Samsung Android phones had GLES 1.1 only on it). Then first few generations (Galaxy S, S2, S3, S4) used PowerVR GPUs
Oh, and stuff like qualcomm-specific hacks people were used to from Jail broken HTC devices (like phone call recording) not working. Final minority complaint was essentially based on qualcomm devices being more popular so you had more resources for custom roms, despite the fact that Exynos meant no need to do complicated jailbreak to load a custom rom.
Personally I found no issue with Exynos chips whatsoever. Always some of the fastest stuff I had in my hands.