Lenovo (and lots of other hardware manufacturers) are proof positive that this is absolutely not the case. There isn't a windows machine bought over the years by my extended family that did not have a whole pile of junk on it right from day one including ad injectors such as described in the article.
Whether or not open source is 'viable' for large numbers of users is no longer a question that needs settling. For bandwidth we have torrents if need be.
Anyway, I view most comment sections as informal/idle chit-chat, and not courtroom/dissertation situations where everything needs to be cited and/or "proved". When I'm commenting I'm usually smiling to myself or amused, not angry or trying to "win" anything.
I've actually never seen an an freedom respecting project that included adware, and I can confidently say that the reason for that is that if a team were to do that, somebody would fork the repo and remove the offensive junk. As long as it gets caught, it's a self healing ecosystem. The same cannot be said for non-free software, as the pool of people who could find junk is so much smaller, but also because if junk were to be found by an employee, they'd have very little power to actually do anything about it.
Open source is volunteers, and when its not, they run on donations. When the donations stop, they stop. Some have found clever ways to make money, such as pay4premium or pay4support, but I've never seen ad injectors. Those come from third party distributors who aren't affiliated with the projects and can be avoided.
That is patently false.
Established profitable companies in a market with multiple competitors usually do not fuck with their customers, if they charge up-front for their product/service.
On the other hand, companies that give away stuff for "free" have to find unique ways to pay the bills (be it hosting fees, or hardware costs, or developer time, etc). In recent years the most common way is to create some way to essentially trick people into clicking ads.
Open Source repositories have not found any long term sustainable method to get compensated for their hosting fees or hardware costs. At the moment, they are run on donations - mostly from commercial vendors, universities and the like. At some point in the future, lets say if 500 million desktop users all start using those repositories, there will come a time when that cost is going to stick out on a balance sheet. I hope that they figure out a way to get paid for their efforts by then.