The question is: what keeps the PF from FSF certification, and does it matter?
The reason the L5 has firmware blobs stored on secondary flash chips is so the user can’t change them, because the RYF certification prohibits user-changeable closed source blobs. Ostensibly, this is because the state of such physical flash chips is fixed (a pattern of electrical potentials), and so is hardware instead of software. This is silly. First, because your flash controller might well decide to load level your flash chip (probably not in the case of the L5, but that really doesn’t matter when considering the RYF requirements in abstract), so it’s not really fixed hardware. Second, because this would still just be a “hardware” configuration if it was stored on the same physical chip as something else, or was user “writeable”. In fact, all being user “writeable” means is the user can change their hardware configuration. And that is the fundamental problem with it.
The Respect your Freedom certification requires the hardware manufacturer to take steps to prevent the owner of the device from modifying some physical aspect of the device. When put that way, it sounds more like the Restricts your Freedom certification.
Purism isn’t to blame for this, the FSF is. But, if the only thing missing from the PF to get the RYF certification is keeping the owner from replacing the binary firmware (say if some anti-trust lawsuit or similar allows the creation of an open source version), that’s a point in favor of the PF, not the L5.