>the only way we'll see long term change is to keep the friction on

... but there are two possible long term changes, right?

In one of them, the friction incrementally pushes manufacturers not to have proprietary firmware and the number of machines supported by the Debian official install improves.

In the other one, the friction incrementally discourages users from installing Debian, and they either give up on Linux or adopt a distribution that isn't quite so user-hostile.