@inference Two problems with the article:
1. Rights are given to you by nature, if you need your rights to be written on a piece of paper (like a "law" or constitution), then you effectively signed away your rights, and they're just privileges instead.
2. You tend to mention security to be commonly forgotten about, but the only example I see is about a smartphone bootloader.
I don't think anyone being pro-free software (not the movement, I mean just free software) would choose a smartphone over a real computer.

The reason why someone would have a smartphone is just to have a cellphone, but all the dumbphones have been taken off the market and/or are no longer compatible with current communication infrastructure (Voice of LTE rather than 2G for example), or banks or governments of most places obligate the use of smartphone crapps in order to use their disservices.

But if you take bootloaders into consideration, it's indeed basically replacing a backdoor for another one rather than outright removing it, because barely anyone considers locking the bootloader after flashing.
Not sure if that even matters anyway, once you install Goolag Crapps after flashing GrapheneOS (I know, it's retarded, but you'll be surprised by how many people actually do that!), then whether the bootloader is locked or unlocked no longer matters, as you just installed a new backdoor either way.