> The reality is most consumer motherboards rarely post updates especially after the first year or so
I can’t confirm that. My current board is the MSI X570-A PRO. First BIOS was 2019-06-20, the latest 2022-08-19. And that’s still updating versions and settings. After 3 years, and I’m expecting more. This has also been my experience with other boards. MB updates tend to last several years.
You have that like exactly backwards. You'll get a lot fewer bios updates from Dell or Lenovo than you will from MSI, Asus, Gigabyte, etc.. consumer / gaming motherboard lines. My 5 year old X370-F GAMING is still getting BIOS updates. Others, like MSI, practically forced AMD to continue issuing AGESA updates for X370 & X470 chipsets after AMD had announced official end of support - they got AMD to change course and add new CPU support to those old chipsets.
But otherwise all the major consumer / gaming motherboards pick up new AGESA updates quickly & consistently, even when they're EOL platforms.
I think most people rely on the operating system to (amazingly) hot patch it during boot. Intel and AMD both publish them and are integrated regularly into most distros (and the linux-firmware git tree). Surprising/weird that they haven't released the Renoir ones.
Also seems Tavis had a bug where Debian wasn't applying them on boot for one reason but didn't give details. Wonder what it was.