Scandals like the proprietary Nvidia driver (which will now get its home in nonfree firmware) gets to happen (and will continue to happen) because the precedent was set.
Doesn’t this depend a lot on the vendors having a lock-in on the GPU market? Semiconductor manufacturing is super expensive and there is little incentive for Nvidia to release a Free as in Libre device driver. There aren’t any FOSS GPUs in development so FOSS drivers can’t be made.
So we either have the choice of accepting proprietary drivers or just not using the functionality of GPUs.