How's tor's security model holding up these days?

Last time I heard of it, a majority of nodes seemed to be controlled by 5eyes/SIGINT/whatever.

What changes has made Tor a secure system today?

Tor is holding up ok as a layer of defense, to be paired with other things (especially with TLS. Always use TLS with tor).

That said, half the internet doesn't work from Tor exit nodes anymore thanks to Google and Cloudflare.

Until someone manages to open source the ME of various CPU chips tools like this don't offer much more than a cushion against basic surveillance. I can only imagine the shitstorm that is to follow when someone finally leaks it.

Do you think that every CPU is reporting upstream everything that's done on it?

If not, then tails is a pretty good improvement.

Even if it doesn't mitigate every conceivable issue, it doesn't mean it's without value.

I'm not a tin-foil hat conspiracy kind of person but I do find it extremely suspect that the ME requires all that kind of access and is completely black-box.

Yes, ideally using a different CPU platform is an option, but not if you want to do any significant work

Shouldn't you then just make sure to use System76, Librem or Raptor machines which avoid this issue?

Of course you would pay the price premium for that level of protection, but interestingly I have yet to hear of someone being compromised specifically via this mechanism.

With all that said, I am very seriously considering buying an ancient ThinkPad, just so I can run Libreboot on it.