I'm no fan of imaginary property, but you're going to have to lay out your reasoning here. Firmware security is such crap precisely because most hardware manufacturers see it as nothing but a cost center they wish they could avoid.

The difficulty of installing OpenWRT or Linux in general on hardware comes from that hardware not being documented, or having straightforward APIs like BIOS/EFI.

Or for some devices, community distributions that dubiously remix manufacturer-supplied binaries are available. But we generally see that as soon as the manufacturer stops their updates, the community versions start lagging behind as well.

The mistrust comes from those doing it, and the clearly corrupt ways they are operating. The maggot movement is basically rooted in a lot of very real frustrations from very real longstanding problems, but the only thing it offers as solutions is performative vice signalling.

People who care about the problems of digital security are not going to lean into the idea of simply banning devices based on where they were manufactured. Rather they would work at general standards and solutions to actually solve the problems - things like untying the markets for hardware/firmware/services, requiring firmware source escrow, mandating LAN protocols and controllers so every single IoT device isn't backhauling to its own mothership, and so on.

Likewise people who care about domestic manufacturing first and foremost are not going to champion applying steep blanket tariffs two decades after all of that industry has already left, or using regulatory agencies to shake down manufacturers for unrelated concessions.

> legal avenues exist to hold those manufacturers accountable

Oh, sweet summer child. Disclaiming these possible avenues of liability is the main goal of clickwrap "terms of service".