Completely agree with you here. Even in my circle of engineer friends I'm generally viewed as the open source zealot for only buying Pixel phones purely because I can unlock the bootloader on them and root them still. I only have one app that actually uses it (for making backups of installed apps) but it's the principle of the thing: if I bought and paid for a device I should be allowed to run whatever darn code I want on it, not only code that the manufacturer says I'm allowed to run. It's my device, not theirs.

Apparently that's a radical position to have these days and I find it irresponsible that software folks of all people won't stand up more for the right to run their code on their own devices without the approval of the manufacturer. As you said, the existence of our industry is due in large part to the openness of previous systems. We owe it to ourselves and those that will come after to ensure this level of openness persists.