> That's pure fearmongering FUD.

It is. It's a community project that you can trust, or not. Debian also reports to servers of "unknown provenance" and updates itself from there.

Now, Debian has probably a lot more eyes on it than some Windows Update revival project, but some more niche distros have essentially the same problem.

> Recommending Debian to the retrocomputing community is possibly the most tone-deaf thing I've seen today.

archive.debian.org might be right up their alley