[grumbel]

The main benefit of reproducible builds isn't security, but sanity. There is just no reason why your build process should produce different output for the same input. That just means it's broken in subtle ways and information is leaking into it that was never intended to be there.

The real benefit of reproducible builds however isn't for the individual software itself, but for the software landscape as a whole. As with reproducible builds you have the whole dependency chain specified completely from top to bottom, no more hidden dependencies. And everything is fully automated, not just on your personal machine, but in a way that others can reproduce. That in turn will dramatically improve the ease with which users can build software (and change it), as it turns an hour long hunt for dependencies into a single click.

To really see the fruits of this labor will still take some years, but it has the potential to pretty drastically reshape and improve the way FOSS software works (e.g. Nix Flakes) and actually allow users to make use of their freedom instead of giving up before they have even managed to build the software.