I went to a Stallman presentation on a local university and I remember he saying something like what I said, this was 12 years ago, so maybe he changed his mind since then with the new trends imposed by the big tech companies.

Do you remember any good article by them? I also remember reading one from the FSF about how websites are not "free" anymore with the raise in popularity of the js/css bundlers that makes frontend code unreadable

From Stallman perspective, a hardware is already "libre" or "free" because you can see what's in there and break it to your liking. But yeah, I agree with you that with mobile devices that's not always true