Good to see you have found your way around, hopefully the out of the blocks baseline wasnt seen as condescending, was next to establish the prefix, suggest dumping the running tree etc.
The prefix environment variable, as you have added, is the recomended way.
Because today's armbian/allwinner associates all h61x soc's under the h616 prefix you have to pay attention to your particular hardware.
The prefix status quo is less of a bug, and more a standing choice of the present framework, the ideology is that anyone who steps into the domain, should know what they are doing, and therefore as you have shown, will navigate.