either they believe in their chinese supply chain or they don't. and it's not like their usa manufacturing is done in-house by librem so they still don't have 'control over the entire assembly process" because they depend on a 3rd party to make their boards for them.
The likelihood of China compromising the Librem 5 is very low, and there are safeguards in place to prevent that. But no safeguard is absolute. Even manufacturing in the US isn't absolute security -- it's just a bit less dangerous than China.
Whether that reduced risk is important enough to be worth $1300... I tend to think it's not, but I assume there are a few people who will care enough to pay that.
The same situation applies to companies like Apple, Samsung, etc... the only difference is that those companies have judged that the potential market benefits of catering to people who have extremely strict privacy requirements is too low to justify starting up US operations.
The hardware switches are also a good example of what I'm talking about here. There is a small risk of malicious firmware or a bug in software allowing a camera to be turned on without your knowledge. Does this mean the iPhone is insecure? There's not a yes or no answer. It means there is a specific subset of users who would be served by a stricter (but still imperfect) extra security control -- a physical kill switch.
An even safer policy would be to remove the camera entirely -- then you could be certain that the physical hardware isn't defective and allowing the camera to be flipped back on. But even that wouldn't be binary security. There is no such thing as binary security.
I find Baskerville pretty readable. Is it the same font you're seeing on the page? I wonder if something caused your browser to show a fallback instead.
I think it reflects that all phones made in China have the potential to be compromised by malicious actors. That risk shouldn't be in most people's threat model, and if you're comparing the Librem to a standard Android phone you're still getting a substantial privacy bump just from hardware kill switches alone.
If you have a very specific threat model, Purism is now one of the few companies that offers made-in-US phones, which (in theory) fills an underserved niche. But most people who want a Librem 5 should get the normal phone.
If you have control over the entire assembly process, that eliminates a class of security risks that otherwise need to be addressed with tamper-evident firmware or by checking for bugs and extra components after the phone is assembled. But that drives costs up substantially, so nobody assembles phones in the US -- not even companies like Apple.
Remember that security isn't binary. Different segments even within the privacy community need different levels of security.