I don't think that's a fair thing to say. To me, being able to trust that my distribution is giving me reasonable help by pre-selecting good applications, is a vital help for me using my computer. I don't have the time to go through all of the applications that I use, so I trust my distribution to do it for me.
If my distribution were to make such a misstep as recommending me to send all my internet-data through a proprietary program made by the biggest data hoarder in the world, this trust would take a severe hit and I couldn't continue actually using my computer, as I'd have to check back with everything that their opinions don't continue to misalign so severely from mine.
Yes, I might have a higher interest in privacy than some other people and yes, there's people out there who for whatever reason seem to think that Google is worth trusting, but that doesn't mean that I just sit in front of my computer all day to be ideologically pure. I just have a different opinion of what's malicious and what's not, and wanting my distribution to agree with me in this aspect, is entirely in interest of being able to use my computer as frictionlessly as possible.
In that case, there are other distributions that align with your goals more closely.
If you're really paranoid, you can use Gentoo or Slack and compile all your software from source. As I understand it, Mint is Ubuntu with a different window manager and all of the closed-source extensions to handle common media formats, that you would normally have to faff around apt-get'ing, pre-installed. It's a desktop Linux for people that either don't know much about Linux, or don't want to get down in the weeds messing and spending hours configuring to do the 95% use cases.
If my distribution were to make such a misstep as recommending me to send all my internet-data through a proprietary program made by the biggest data hoarder in the world, this trust would take a severe hit and I couldn't continue actually using my computer, as I'd have to check back with everything that their opinions don't continue to misalign so severely from mine.
Yes, I might have a higher interest in privacy than some other people and yes, there's people out there who for whatever reason seem to think that Google is worth trusting, but that doesn't mean that I just sit in front of my computer all day to be ideologically pure. I just have a different opinion of what's malicious and what's not, and wanting my distribution to agree with me in this aspect, is entirely in interest of being able to use my computer as frictionlessly as possible.