If I was paranoid, I'd say those devices are developed just to get the most paranoid to use them. :P
But in truth, I'm not paranoid.. merely a realist. Regardless, I was thinking of buying a Librem, but can you even get one yet? It always says "6 months to delivery".
The design seems to work in favour of the paranoid, it takes an extra-double-ultra-plus paranoid who takes the board through an X-ray machine to find those hidden traces or sandwiched secret baseband processors to uncover this nefarious plot.
Alternatively these devices deliver on this front, i.e. the user gets to control whether the baseband is active or not. I'm not paranoid enough for the former scenario so I'll keep it at the latter and am considering to get a Pinephone for fun and, well, fun I guess - I already have plenty of devices running different iterations of AOSP, some of them running headless Linux without zygote (i.e. without the Android user space). A truly modular multi-vendor architecture with pluggable SoC, baseband, storage, audio, camera, sensor package, power supply and display would be the preferred solution - something like the original PC clone market with vendors competing on price and features - but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for it. Not that long, anyway.
But in truth, I'm not paranoid.. merely a realist. Regardless, I was thinking of buying a Librem, but can you even get one yet? It always says "6 months to delivery".