It depends on the perspective. If you're concerned about security fixes and people being able to submit patches for the broken shit drivers manufacturers provide, then we still need the source and relevant schematics.
Of course if all you care about is "it boots" then having a binary blob lying around and doing god knows what with your entire computing is a "viable" option.
Not so long ago hardware vendors sold hardware and provided all schematics along... because that's what hardware manufacturers are for?! Nowadays they're more like a service provider trying to lock you into weird things and it's certainly not for the benefit of us users and maintainers. I think the issue was explained at length in this blog post called "Ok lenovo we need to talk":
Of course if all you care about is "it boots" then having a binary blob lying around and doing god knows what with your entire computing is a "viable" option.
Not so long ago hardware vendors sold hardware and provided all schematics along... because that's what hardware manufacturers are for?! Nowadays they're more like a service provider trying to lock you into weird things and it's certainly not for the benefit of us users and maintainers. I think the issue was explained at length in this blog post called "Ok lenovo we need to talk":
https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/mmu_man/2021-10-04_ok_lenovo_w...