Their point is to answer the question "who is going to consent to Google telemetry on linux". 99% of humanity, that's who.

Corporations can plaster over the open source baseline to make a Product, at which point Consumers will feel the comfort and familiarity of being able to displace responsibility for their satisfaction onto someone else in exchange for a price, such as their privacy.

Consider the Capitalist adage "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product". How would that belief affect how someone feels about baseline Linux, about FOSS in general? They would constantly be waiting for the catch, for the monetization or hack or cult pitch or communism that explains why people are spending their time contributing to FOSS instead of making money.

Corporations are the devil they know.

absolutely irrelevant that in the backend is running a linux kernel

I don't think so. Android is a Linux distribution, because it distributes Linux and is build the operating system using it. Besides that, Linux itself isn't fully POSIX standard conform too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX#Partially_conformant and thus no operating system built distributing the Linux Kernel is POSIX compliant. Android supports lot of POSIX functions, so its not that far off. The difference is not POSIX, it's actually GNU tools and proprietary blobs included, and the user application packages that make it so much different.

Also interestingly there is a man page about these type of standards: https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/standards.7.html

Ah, so there’s no Linux in Android and it’s running some other kernel. Must have been mistaken, sorry.

I wonder what will be the point where we stop calling SteamOS a Linux distribution too. Maybe greybeards and their GNU/Linux thing were right. But now Ubuntu switched to Rust coreutils, I guess it’s no longer Linux. Apple recently stopped certifying POSIX compatibility so MacOS is longer UNIX even if they run BSD coreutils. Gosh, darnit.