all GPUs (integrated and dedicated) increase the attack surface of the system with blobs …
the CPU and GPU are kinda’ like the human-brain (two hemispheres each playing a different role)
Funily enough, there exists free firmware for GPUs, which were made by… Nvidia. The GPUs up to Kepler were reverse engineered by the titans of the nouveau project. Sadly, Nvidia decided to hobble unsigned firmware on future GPUs, and while nouveau also provided firmware for at least some of them (I stopped tracking), the GPUs are limited to like 10% speed with it.
Aye, I recently deployed a 10 year old NVidia card, and it runs quite well with the Nouveau drivers. As you say, more recent ones require signed firmware, and cannot have their clocks unlocked without it. Which NVidia did to maintain their artificial product segmentation, and is truly sad as the hardware is reasonably well documented. The nouveau drivers could likely be actually useful, similar to the amdgpu driver, were that not the case.