Yeah you’re right, NXP does lean into Yocto. The IMX line has good support with it. You might have the flexibility of going with the community built BSPs and/or vanilla Linux kernel, if you don’t want to rely fully on NXP written software. I’m not 100% certain on the support for your boards under the community supported repos, so you’ll have to look into your exact use case. But it does give you some options.
Correct. You want to look at removing or editing the getty.
https://tldp.org/LDP/sag/html/config-init.html