I think this piece (along with many, many others in the genre) is unduly discounting the practical implications of a proprietary binary for users, preferring to blame a preference for open source solely on a "fundamentalist FOSS mentality". For example, my next GPU is going to be a Radeon largely because I'm tired of the weird issues that come with installing/updating proprietary drivers, the lack of transparency around bug reports, and the general disconnects with the rest of the FOSS ecosystem.
The specific issues for applications are different, but there are parallels. The key thing is that FOSS on Linux isn't just an ideology, it's also an ecosystem and a set of norms and practices. When you ship a proprietary product, users have to weigh the cost of opting out of all of that, not just the sticker price. Nobody with any sense would ship a Windows package solely as source code and expect Windows users to love it. I can't imagine anyone blaming a weak reception of such a product on a "fundamentalist proprietary blob mentality". But when they similarly sidestep standard practices on Linux, any friction is almost reflexively attributed to the users being unreasonable.
The specific issues for applications are different, but there are parallels. The key thing is that FOSS on Linux isn't just an ideology, it's also an ecosystem and a set of norms and practices. When you ship a proprietary product, users have to weigh the cost of opting out of all of that, not just the sticker price. Nobody with any sense would ship a Windows package solely as source code and expect Windows users to love it. I can't imagine anyone blaming a weak reception of such a product on a "fundamentalist proprietary blob mentality". But when they similarly sidestep standard practices on Linux, any friction is almost reflexively attributed to the users being unreasonable.