If this is true, it's a bit concerning for Ledger users. One state-mandated firmware update away from losing all your crypto?
« il existe pour une certaine partie des utilisateurs une réelle légitimité dans la volonté de protéger ses échanges. L’approche est donc différente. Mais ça ne nous empêchera pas de poursuivre les éditeurs, si des liens sont découverts avec une organisation criminelle et qu’ils ne coopèrent pas avec la justice. »
Charitably, GrapheneOS are not in fact a front for organized crime, but merely paranoid, assuming that the news coverage is laying the groundwork for prosecution on trumped-up charges. Notably, there doesn't appear to have been direct communication from law enforcement yet.
The difference between someone being paranoid and someone being right, is time.
Of course if your organization have connections to a criminal organization, you are going to be in trouble. Same thing for refusing to cooperate with law enforcement, this is not some abstract thing, it is about following the law, for example relating to evidence tampering or search warrants.
I don't think France is anything special in that regard.
Open source developers have been given jail sentences in the last months.
If you're a broke open source developer - even if you believe under the law you're not doing anything wrong - would you want to be exposed to law enforcement harassment (lawfare) for no reason?
Also: chat control.
The only way you can beat it, as a governement trying to insert a backdoor, is through use of tivoization or some other technology that clinches control during manufacturing or other centralization weak points around economies of scale that the re-programmers don't have.
And they don't give a damn about attracting eyeballs since the surveillance will be mandated by law and done legally by the book, and it will be done "for your own safety and protection against the boogieman", so that people will accept it.
As a side note, Bitcoin Core mitigates this risk with deterministic builds and multiple independent developers verifying and signing releases. But this option isn't available for Ledger as most of the firmware is closed source.