Yeah wtf. I can't even figure out how it would stop you.

yes, I think the main thing is when the nonfree firmware was included (user can opt-out) as a default at install. So out of the box support for most common hardware became way better.

It was always pretty easy to add nonfree repositories, but having to manually sort out wifi firmware after an install was a pain.

Yes this meme is dated. You can run proprietary stuff in bookworm with just a couple of check boxes.

Yes, but it's significantly less automatic. Testing distros on an old laptop, Debian wouldn't support the network card out of the box and I had to use USB tethering from my phone to get the necessary drivers off the internet. Ubuntu just had them in the image and installed them automatically.