Browsers have gotten insanely shitty past couple years. Both FF and Chrome track your every move and make it incredibly hard to turn off. They're CONSTANTLY pushing out new, untrusted code into your machine and there is no practical way to turn the shit off.
monopolize all the benefits of free software licenses, using a combination of dirty tricks to ensure that the tools that were nominally owned by no one and licensed under free and open terms nevertheless remained under their control
No. Just no. This writer has no understanding of how software licensing for "open source" software works whatsoever. "Open source" is classified under dozens of different licenses from MIT to Apache 2 to GPL 3 to any different set of rules ranging from "have fun, do whatever" to "you can't even redistribute the source you downloaded even without modification and full copyright headers and explicit licenses included". "Source available" 'open source' software gets even more complicated. I professionally get paid to distribute one of these.
There are no "dirty tricks". The code is made available to you for use under a license that is one of the only files in the root folder of that distribution (if done properly). The first 10 lines will give you more than enough information to know if:
Those are the 4 primary things you need to look for before attempting to use "Source available" software. Those are again often simply referred to under those previous licenses like MIT, Apache, GPL, etc.
"Open Source" does not mean "free to use". Often it is simply a nicer term for "Source Available under restrictions". Nothing dirty about it
Oh also, in case nobody has picked up on it. All future versions of Chrome (auto-updates, so basically all Chrome installs) will ban adblockers.