Windows users should push for FOSS drivers as well also when the proprietary ones run perfectly. Privacy and security issues aside, being forced to depend on a closed driver means that the manufacturer can make the product obsolete just by stopping support on newer Windows versions, therefore turning the product essentially into trash, thus forcing the user to buy a new one.
The vast majority of Windows users don't really care about that though.
In the 90s, software modems ("winmodems", see [0]) were popular because they were cheaper than using dedicated hardware for generating and decoding the audio signals sent over the phone line. Those would break if the manufacturer didn't upgrade their driver for newer versions of Windows, since they're completely software driven.
I'd be very surprised if things have changed since then, and I bet that the majority of consumers would just pick the cheapest option at the big box store.
I remember getting PCI based Winmodems working on my old machines back in the late 90s/early 2000s. A lot of people bought ISA modems or physical COM port models so they wouldn't have to deal with that bullshit.
Now most Linux distributions are littered with binary blobs in linux-firmware that have to be loaded for everything from Wi-Fi to Bluetooth. We've gone the total opposite direction of where we should be .. except for like .. amdgpu.
Winmodems were not popular with anybody except manufacturers, and exponentially increased the support issues with modems as an entire technology. Read: people had more problems with Winmodems than they did before.
Not true in all locales. In 2001 I bought a computer locally (Haifa, Israel) with a winmodem. I installed Red Hat on it, so obviously the winmodem would not work. I could not find a hardware modem locally. The only solution that I had was to go with an ADSL line (250k up, 750k down) which cost a fortune but whose modem would plug into the network card.
It would be a full two years before I would see any other home users on anything other than dialup. 750k down in 2001 was so impressive, you could start listening to songs on Kazaa as soon as the download started!
The windows approach to driver certification makes this really difficult. Microsoft virtually requires every driver maintainer to pay $100-odd every couple of years for a signing certificate (and ironically enough this is done in the name of improving driver quality). For a corporation that's nothing, but it's a pretty steep ask for the hobbyist maintainers that OSS drivers tend to rely on.
