Their approach is firmly stuck in the computing paradigm of the 70s and 80s, much like Stallman is personally stuck in the social narrative of the same era. The FSF and him refuse to change and adapt to the times.

But since reality doesn't care about their refusal to adapt, and they can't just throw their hands up in the air and say nothing is free any more and you should just live off the grid and reject all technology, they instead have built a deliberately obtuse set of rules to declare certain things out of scope, so they can maintain the illusion of freedom for their followers while making concessions behind the scenes (and even actively working with manufacturers to devise silly workarounds that fit into that framework, see e.g. the Librem 5's ridiculous secondary CPU core and external flash dance so they can claim the RAM training blob doesn't make their device non-free).

Then they're very careful to never talk about this unless prompted; the fewer people know about all these secret blobs they're running anyway, the better. It's basically cult-like behavior - this kind of control of the information and narrative that followers get is a defining characteristic.

None of this helps users, of course; what would help users would be being informed about not just exactly what blobs exist, but what the risks are, how they might affect their privacy and security, what update options exist, and whether they can be audited or replaced with free versions in the future. But the FSF doesn't care about any of that. They just want to pretend they live in a blob-free utopia.

Edit: Ah, the downvotes have started. I guess the FSF fans have showed up. I hope you're not using an off the shelf mouse to click on the downvote button; those all run proprietary USB HID firmware.