At the point where they are running a custom ROM, this feels like a bad faith argument. It’s like claiming someone running Linux is clearly a Microsoft supporter when they bought a laptop preinstalled with Windows and replaced the OS day 1.

Exactly what alternative are you proposing? They don’t buy any hardware at all? It materializes out of thin air?

abolishing the European Union

Ah, yes. I believe this was step 4 of setting up your self-hosted instance.