I have never heard a convincing argument that any piracy is ethically or morally wrong: no one is being deprived of anything. You have to manually construct a scenario where someone is about to pay an independent artist for their work and then decides to use a copy instead, and even then I think it’s hard to argue any actual harms.

They’re all in bed together.

No, we’re at the point where the people pushing these laws do understand how the Internet works, and they want to control all of it.

I think you’re both interpreting the original quote in different ways. It was the obvious choice only because it was popular, but it wasn’t popular because it was the best at reviving old hardware. There were many better options for squeezing performance out of old systems, and they would have been more “obvious choices” than Ubuntu for anyone with any knowledge of the Linux ecosystem.

Can’t you still transfer content to them? Just pirate everything you paid for and manually put it on there. I have a newer Kindle and I have never once connected it to their servers, just use Calibre.