> I also don't care that much whether the proprietary firmware is stored on on-board flash and programmed from the factory or if it's uploaded by my OS when the driver is loaded.
Bingo!
Nobody cares about firmware, that's not the issue, never was... but somehow that became the narrative repeated by people who don't know what they are talking about.
Many firmware loading drivers have caused drama over the years. I'm not sure if anybody remembers when Pottering and Sievers re-worked udev to change the ordering of how firmware was loaded from user-space, trying to improve how computers booted, by graphing firmware loads, determining the loading ordering, etc... which sometimes need to happen before it's kernel driver loads, or sometimes the driver itself is able to load the firmware, or the driver begin lazy, expects udev to load the firmware after the kmod is loaded... As a result, the kernel loads firmwares itself.
I'd say the whole firmware thing needs to be put under review, with concrete rules how they are loaded, and what their interfaces has to look like, and what hardware abstraction rules actually apply.
