I strongly agree with your viewpoint, and searching for tools which are better in all aspects than their mainstream counterparts is also how I got into this community. Tools which are usable, ad/spam-free, and open source tend to also be privacy-respecting, so there is certainly a lot of overlap.
I think the OP article is a good reminder to the privacy community that you don’t have to recommend tools solely because they are private:
The fact is that most software in general is buggy and unusable. We simply tend to give more visibility to some buggy and unusable tools than they otherwise deserve, just because they happen to be privacy-respecting. I think this is probably a mistake that will harm the credibility of all “privacy tools” in the long run.
Respecting privacy shouldn’t be a free pass for developers to put in the minimum possible effort into their products, respecting privacy is just the minimum bar to pass to be considered at all. Services like Proton, Bitwarden, and Firefox all prove that polished, user-friendly products can be privacy-respecting, and that’s what we should demand from anyone else who claims to want to bring privacy to the masses.
This is a tale as old as time. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.
I don’t see my job as convincing people they need to care about privacy, as much as making sure that when they do care, their privacy journey is as easy as possible.