The FSF has an unfortunate relationship with firmware, resulting in policies that made sense in the late 1980s, but actively harm users today, through recommending obsolescent equipment, requiring increased complexity in RYF-certified hardware designs and discouraging both good security practices and the creation of free replacement firmware. As a result of these policies, deficient hardware often winds up in the hands of those who need software freedom the most, in the name of RYF-certification.
We need the idealists to keep pushing for more open standards. Sure, it’s not realistic for most people to get by with pure libre devices, but the people at FSF and GNU have inspired a lot of positive changes. I live in a grey area, trying my best, but have learned to trim back gradually the proprietary software. I’ve just gotten Fairphone and installed e/os (no whatsapp, facebook, google maps, etc and it’s a removed), my Tuxedo computer runs Fedora and my Raspberry Pis run Raspi OS; yeah, there are all kinds of firmware blobs, but I do the best I can and move on, always towards more ethical and libre products. I also donate money to libre projects.