Search for "debian non-free iso" and you probably will find what you are looking for.
> ...nightmare maze of wrong links and secret knowledge.
Please, don't exaggerate.
And the result is that 99.99% of people can't get 99.99% freedom because of 0.01% of people doubling down on the 0.01% of freedom. I love Debian, but I consider that gatekeeping a great crime against regular people who could be empowered and informed from minimal freedom to nearly total freedom instead of kept out by arcanity and hardlining.
That's why I like the link I posted. Because it says "this will actually work on your computer" AND also informs you about user freedom and the harm of proprietary device drivers.
> Please, don't exaggerate.
Let's perform an exercise, shall we? Starting from www.debian.org, reading from top left to bottom right as the English language is read, how many words must you pass over, how many links must you pass over, which links do you have to click, and how do you know to click those links and not the other ones in order to find an iso that installs on a market standard laptop over WiFi? The decision tree is much deeper than you acknowledge.
I guess you should start with the first link, the one that says "About Debian". There you can know what Debian is about and align your expectations.
If you think it works for you, then go back to www.debian.org and do a ctrl+f and type "download", there is a big button in the top right corner. It is probably what you need (amd64, netinstall).
The project is explicitly about free software, so you should not be able to walk in the door and casually/accidentally walk out with non-free software. But more importantly, it should be a fairly straightforward process to identify "how many non-free sources did I need to incorporate in order to make my piece of 2004 hardware boot and run acceptably?" vs "how many ... in 2019?"
One of the ideals of the Debian distro is also reproducibility, for reasons I won't go into since it's not particularly relevant, but for anyone who hasn't seen it before already: https://isdebianreproducibleyet.com/
The non-free parts will (potentially, depending on what kind of non-free I guess...) always keep this number under 100%
I love the Debian that Gotham Needs, I've never seen this, and the big red asterisk on "should" handles this concern neatly ;)
I am a software developer who uses Linux exclusively since about 2000 and has contributed indirectly to Debian.
Last week I wanted to setup Debian on my new work laptop. Naively and without thinking much I downloaded the default image, so the wifi card didn't work.
I was on holiday, abroad with friends. Even with both the buster and testing non-free images the wifi card didn't work.
After three hours (downloading, installing a cd creator on a mac of a friend etc) I got frustrated, downloaded an Ubuntu image and it just worked.
I mean, I can (and do) manually apt-get the right firmware packages at some point, either popping a shell during install or after first boot, but it is definitely a maze of some kind, especially if you don't know what package contains the firmware you need.