GNU Doesn't Care About Your Agency

"No firmware blobs" especially is a weird stance to take, since it is not free to begin with and the upgrades fix real security issues.

Except you can do that with bikes. You can fit a motor on a bike and turn it into a moped/motorized bicycle. Which means this is actually a great analogy. It's like buying a bike that is specially designed to defeat any attempts at attaching a motor to it, because the bicycle manufacturer believes that bicycles should only ever be human-powered regardless of circumstances.

Maybe you bought this bike because you liked their message of "no cars, only bikes!" and associated branding, but you didn't actually care that strongly about their extreme anti-motor stance. But now you've moved to a place with lots of hills and you can't get around very easily as it's too tiring to go up all those hills, so you'd like to attach a motor just for the hills and you can't. Or maybe you have Long COVID and the fatigue is enough that you can't pedal very much anymore, so you want a motor to give you assistance and allow you to choose whether to pedal or to let the motor take over depending on how you feel.

But since you bought a bike that prevents this, your only option now is to get rid of it, buy a brand new bike, new seat (since your old bike used non-standard seats), new saddle bags (since your old bike used non-standard saddle bags), and all of the other more minor details that go into switching from one type of bike to another. It's a big expense and takes a lot of time and energy to deal with, and until you do you're stuck at home with no way to get around, since that bike was your sole lifeline to the world.

The FSF is irrelevant in discussions about FOSS, because they are absolutely unwilling to compromise. They purport to being a movement, but they do everything in their power to stay as small and elitist as possible. Like recommending extremely niche distros that will provide a bad experience on 99% of computers you run it on (and insecure on 100%).

So there are plenty of reasons to write this article that have nothing to do with RMS. We could've had effective software freedom advocacy, but all we got was elitist entitled bickering about how everyone else is unethical and interviews full of FSF spokespeople nitpicking to a degree most people will roll their eyes and move on immediately. I guess that's mostly RMS, and he simply doesn't have the charisma to pull it off well.

In my experience, most security patches are future proofing. What's wrong with having a locked down firewall, not running weird software, and setting up apparmor or selinux?

If you want an analogy, it's like saying a product with a NEMA 5-15 grounded power plug (the one with 3 prongs) removes your agency to use a NEMA 1-15 ungrounded (2-prong) outlet.

Even if the product doesn't require a ground, and will work with a cheater plug.