Despite the fact that they're primarily a systemd distro, Arch Linux strongly recommends that you mount efivarfs in ro mode and remount rw when doing kernel upgrades.
GRUB2 seems to use efibootmgr to write stuff to EFI, and efibootmgr appears to lack a "detect if efivarfs is mounted ro and temporarily mount it rw" switch, so you have to do that manually too.
Gentoo's Genkernel-next doesn't seem to do anything at all with EFI.
Dracut (one of RedHat's initrd management tools) looks like it reads from efivarfs, but does not write to it. (But there's a lot of code in Dracut, so it's entirely possible I missed something.)
It's not entirely clear to me that you can't use BIOS boot with a GPT-formatted disk if your bootloader supports that sort of thing. It's also not clear to me whether or not chainloading from GRUB into Windows is supported with a BIOS/GPT partitioning scheme.
Regardless, it's a pity that the UEFI design committee apparently thought that requiring one to write data into the motherboard's persistent storage in order to boot into a OS was a reasonable thing to do.
Why not leave it unmounted entirely, and only mount it when installing new boot entries?
Because there are -presumably- reasons to read EFI variables? If they're exposed through efivarsfs, then it's a convenient way to access them.