But the author doesn’t give a single example, and so there’s nothing someone else can do to explain why or continue the conversation. The best we got use that he has a vague sense of unease, which I don’t think is very useful.

...which I've come to expect from Microsoft. Windows scrozzles the efi partition for my other OS every third or fourth time it installs updates. It's like they think they own every computer they have code on.

They do think they own every computer they have code on. This is modern computing. Your hardware is an extension of "the cloud", if you let MS, apple, or any other big co into it.