Let me put it another way: you are free to buy spare parts from Fairphone and that lets you fix your phone. But you can't build or sell those spare parts yourself.
Compare this to MNT: they publish the PCBs of all their electronic components, and the STEP files for all the mechanical parts. If I wanted to, I could manufacture the exact same MNT laptops myself tomorrow and it would be completely legal.
This is what "free hardware" is understood to be. I'm not pigeonholeing anything: you're the one who misunderstands what free hardware is.