By all means, the "free software community" should promote HW with free firmware, and giving the top spot on the kernel.org pages sounds like a good approach. And yeah, I spent a lot of time looking at wifi drivers when getting a wifi router. ath9k was the gold standard here with no blobs, and as a result was the favored platform for the wifi bufferbloat work. Unfortunately the follow-up ath10k needs a blob.

But I don't think punishing potential users who just want to get their laptop to work is particularly effective free software advocacy. Most likely the user has no clue what wifi chip their laptop has.