I am willing to entertain the possibility that commercial OSs have advantages. But the claim was "no OS is immune from this", while only pointing at a specific subset of OSs to support that claim and ignoring a wide selection of options that very much do appear immune to ads infesting the experience.

Also, you must not have tried Debian very recently, since as of https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2022/10/msg00... it also includes firmware by default.