The boot partition presence doesn't depend directly on the Armbian version—it's determined by the board configuration. Some configs enable an extra boot partition, especially for boards using older U-Boot versions that can't boot directly from ext4. As a result, even for the same board and Armbian version, different branches (e.g., legacy, vendor, current, edge) may behave differently. Vendor branch might use an old BSP U-Boot requiring the extra partition while mainline branch uses newer U-Boot that boots straight from ext4.
jacksjill reacted to Werner in Armbian Imager has FLASH failure