You can't seperate the technology from the company in this case. The complete violation of privacy is baked into the technology with no way to seperate it. The companies practices are baked into the technology with no way to seperate it. Which also applies to most technologies.
If you think we can/should seperate the technology from the company that makes it, you're incredibly naive. The privacy violations are an inherent feature of the technology itself.
I've literally never installed an operating system. I can pretty confidently say that most of the people I know have never installed an operating system either.
I probably could follow all those steps because I've had experience navigating my computer's BIOS, but most people don't even know what a BIOS is. To ask them to navigate and make sense of it without detailed instructions is pretty unfair.
The fediverse is a very niche place, and the general tech savvyness that's common here should not be taken as an actual measure of how tech savvy the general population is.
Technically, calling different distributions of Linux "versions of Linux" is completely accurate based on the definition of the word "version," and based on how the word is generally used in every day speech.
You're just being pedantic. Which is completely valid, I'm also being very pedantic.
Why would they do that if they can make more money the way they did it, while facing no consequences?