[_heimdall]

I believe the real complaint here is that you can't buy and use a Pixel at all without ending up as a row in Google's database that may include hardware identifiers, network details, you're location, your phone number, etc.

When buying a phone directly from Google you are indeed buying the hardware but you don't actually own the software. The OS will work only if Google still supports it and allows you to use it. The article is raising the point that even if you don't want to use Google's software and instead want to jump straight to your own OS installation you can't avoid their OS initialization steps and any network traffic sent back to Google first