Accusing me of your own sins.
> What do you mean by "tampering" here? Is uploading firmware to peripherals a "tampering"? Why is this a problem, compared with other devices? Does anybof those blobs run on the CPU? I don't understand what you are trying to say.
On the laptop, messing with the system memory (/run) and dumping firmware packages in there instead of just shipping it with the OS using a sensible approach like the linux-firmware package is a hack-job and nasty practice. And since it's messing with system memory, that's your "tampering" right there.
On the phone, once again, instead of using a normal, sensible approach like the linux-firmware package on desktop Linux or the vendor partition on Android, they just store the firmware in some chip, then have the OS (or more accurately, the initramfs) mount the content of the chip using overlayfs in /lib/firmware anyways. It's another implementation of the same hackjob. That, and they combine it with using peripherals whose firmware are stored inside of internal flash chips so the OS doesn't have to be shipped with firmware packages that it then needs to load into the peripherals.
What does this entire exercise do for freedom or openness? *Asbolutely nothing*. It's called shuffling the firmware storage around so you can market the OS as "blob free" when it's literally meaningless. If anything, it makes it harder to audit and figure out which firmware version is being run than if the firmware were to be shipped along with the OS.
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To dumb it down a notch if you really do not understand what I am trying to say:
This makes about as much sense as if I were to take the SSD out of my laptop, destroy the M.2 socket, then advertise it as a "storage free and OS free laptop". To use the laptop, you must plug in external storage through the USB port and load up an OS. But hey, since there is no SSD or OS on the "main" part of the laptop, I am now qualified for some made up certification and can advertise my stuff as "freeing" the user from the shackles of the evil storage system and nastiness of having an OS. Definitely more "open" than other laptops.