That BIOS feature can be disabled.... now. But there's nothing keeping a manufacturer from just not providing that functionality, and requiring only signed firmware updates. Now the machine is more or less locked down.
The fact it can be disabled now is a convenience feature based on historical availability, but that's absolutely no guarantee it will continue to be there in the future.
You say that based on 30-40 years of companies not really knowing what they were doing, but we live in a world where hardware manufacturers ABSOLUTELY know how to make nearly unhackable, locked down hardware. Smartphones are already like this - if the manufacturer decides you don't get to install a custom OS, unless you're lucky enough for there to be an exploit, you don't get to. Same goes for game consoles. That knowledge can easily be applied to these to make these, if not completely unhackable, so unstable and inconvenient as to be almost the same.
I set my sights on a permanent residency during the first Trump administration and now I'm securely out of the mess.
Wasn't easy. Was extremely low pay for a few years and finally turning it around now. But the quality of life I'm experiencing is orders of magnitude greater than what the US is offering now if you aren't already wealthy.
Yes, but it's going to repeat that way FOREVER the same way the average person got slow walked hand in hand with a mobile operating system into corporate social media and app hell, taking the entire internet with them.
Something broken on the laptop? It's so locked down nobody can do a damn thing about it, and even if I could I can't spend 15 minutes of class time troubleshooting while the others are waiting, so I guess you're just not participating today, Billy.
Well, what do you expect them to do? Internally reflect and admit they were wrong?