In case you missed it, the claim has nothing to do with choice -- it has to do with making a blanket, absolute statement for one thing and a more nuanced statement for another.

I guess you're exactly the person these types of statements were meant to placate.

As a public statement, mathematical existence of risk may, if small enough, can very well be said to be non-existing. For all practical purposes, is a 1e-10 risk contain any sort of information for the average people? Is it lying to call it risk-free? I really don’t think so, human language is not exact - in the real world nothing would be risk-free otherwise, essentially we would loose that word.