Toms has never claimed to be perfect but they are one of the last places you can look to for some very detailed breakdowns that don’t involve scrubbing through a youtube video.

Back on topic, calling it spyware is a slap on the wrist. Metas tracking pixel is spyware. What was found was a keylogger, password stealer, and cryptowallet key stealer that was baked into the initial windows install and recovery partition.

I would hope that the skill level of those who use mini-PC's for use-cases other than pure aesthetic would be able to nuke both partitions and start afresh anyway, sidestepping this type of shithousery.

For sure, but what if it were a UEFI-embedded rootkit? Even Lenovo had those back in the day. And these days, with LogoFAIL vulnerable firmware still out in the wild, anyone in the supply chain could embed a malware in the UEFI (assuming that new boxes are still being shipped with vulnerable firmware, which, I won't be surprised if they were, as most of these small time vendors are pretty bad at pushing firmware updates).

a site with more adverts than article words

Ublock origin, firefox on android allows you to install extensions.

I was reading this article from my company's iPhone (everything set to default basically) and look the ad they served me

An ad that talks about removing ads XD