> Instead of trying convince-by-assertion

TBF the idea that any and all fingerprinting falls under the umbrella of exploiting a vulnerability was also presented as an assertion. At least personally I think it's a rather absurd notion.

Certainly you can exploit what I would consider a vulnerability to obtain information useful for fingerprinting. But you can also assemble readily available information and I don't think that doing so is an exploit though in most cases it probably qualifies as an unfortunate oversight on the part of the software developer.