Nah because AMD ships something similar with its processors as well. There was an effort to get AMD to open source its management coprocessor which could have given AMD a competitive advantage but they resisted, which has really fueled the conspiracy theories that some outside organization is responsible for this industry-wide stubbornness.

Its indicative of an extremely high barrier to entry into the CPU market, and certainly a large part of that has to do with both industry collusion to keep competition down and the behavior of corrupt government actors under their payroll.

It also shows that the market of people willing to put money where their mouth is on this are fairly few and far between. The Raptor workstation crowdfunding campaign promised to get rid of all the proprietary firmware in the system and failed by a large margin.

Nope. Basically every vendor is doing the same thing.

Power9 is not. See https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/