You only own the hardware if you can use it as advertised even after breaking all ties with the vendor. Otherwise you bought a service not a product.

You aren't restricted at a hardware level.

So you're just replying to the headline, not the actual article. Useful.

Apple, just like Microsoft, has a driver signing process because drivers have basically system-wide access to a system. There is no evidence that nvidia has tried to get eGPU drivers signed for years, but now someone did and Apple signed it. So?

And you could always, precisely as the article states in the very first paragraph, disable System Integrity Protection if you want to run drivers that aren't signed.