There's a lot of interest in building fully local chat applications, and the people interested in those (myself included) are disproportionately likely to click

There's a lot of interest in building fully local chat applications, and the people interested in those (myself included) are disproportionately likely to click on a submission advertising itself as an open source assistant. You're not wrong in your definition, but neither are we—there's a reason why F-Droid provides warning banners on apps that rely on proprietary APIs. A large portion of the free software movement would rather use an inferior free solution than one that is better but proprietary. That said, don't take the criticisms too much to heart—I think it's great that people are building things at all points on the free software spectrum.