It's only the mobile apps of the auxillary services (drive, pass etc.) that are proprietary. And I don't get why either because it wouldn't hurt them one bit.
If there was a license that i.e. required a certain percentage of all revenue that can be attributed to the usage of the software, a for-profit company could utilise it without paying a cent if they used it without generating revenue with it.
I see you quoting "Free as in Freedom" but you seem to imply that FOSS also means "Free as in gratis". That is not true. FOSS does not grant you the freedom of receiving everything for free (gratis).
restrictions like that aren’t compatible with the FOSS freedoms
They are.
FOSS freedoms are about what you're allowed to do with the code, not about providing those privieges for free (as in: gratis) to everyone.
It's whether the freedoms are attainable at all; in proprietary software, the freedoms are not attainable, no matter how much you pay for it. Paying for the privilege of being granted those freedoms does not stand in direct conflict with FOSS IMV as long as it is reasonably possible to attain them.
Where it gets complex is transitive freedoms. If I sell you my FOSS program and grant you all the freedoms that includes the freedom to grant those freedoms to others. Such "licensing proxies" are impossible to forbid without limiting essential freedoms of FOSS.
One possible method that sprung to my mind is to only allow granting the rights on modified copies ("modification" meaning original work atop of the licensed work) or even just the modifications themselves. This would technically restrict an essential freedom but I don't consider those to be set in stone either.
It would be extremely difficult to implement this in a manner that actually makes the freedoms attainable and there are tons of complexities in this that I've glossed over but I don't see a licensing model that requires monetary payment in exchange for the freedoms as fundamentally wrong or incompatible with the spirit of F(L)OSS.
Headless distros won't really differ in RAM usage. The only generic OS property that I could relistically see saving significant resources in this regard would be 32bit but that's... eh.
What's more important is how you utilize the limited resources. If you have to resort to containers for everything and run 50 instences of postgres, redis etc. because the distro doesn't ship the software you want to run natively, that won't work.
For NAS purposes and a few web services though, even containers would likely work just fine.
Yes and that's precisely the point. You can make the decision not to pay and there are good reasons to do so (I do so too) but you must recognise that someone is still not getting paid for their work.
Exodus shows all permissions the app could use or request. You have denied all of those.