A high level explanation

Be that as it may, it's still an incredibly short sighted decision to use a centralized service that is under 3rd party control for real security sensitive applications.

Can someone please provide context for us noobs?

Both of them?

They don't care at all. What they do care is sowing polarization and distrust between western citizens. Russia benefits most when we (the West) are divided on various social issues, which leads to distrust of authorities, election of extremists in office and eventually weak and corrupt states and governments that are easily controlled or countered by Russia.

It's people who know they will be irrelevant because they spent decades producing shit software

So the Linux kernel is shit software now? Just because it's not written in the newest programming language? Kind of a hot take.

This article reads like a press release from SUSE.

Sure, but for Russia it's the actual doctrine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_military_deception

you're a rock star

The top level management: CEO, CFO, CTO etc. Basically, the big bosses.

What mistakes? They got rich with No Mans Sky.

You make a lot of good points, but I have to disagree on the "don't let the user see or touch anything". That's very much not the way immutable distros behave (and I speak mostly about Fedora Silverblue here, I don't have experience with other immutable systems): you can touch and change anything and often times you have mechanisms put in place by the distro developers to do exactly that. It's just that the way you make changes is very different from classical distros, that's all, but you can definitely customize and change whatever you want. I feel the comparison between immutable distros and Apple is really far off: Apple actively prevents users from making changes, while immutable Linux is the opposite -- while there may be some technical limitations, the devs try to empower the user as much as possible.