I dunno. Seems like a boiling frog scenario. They keep adding hoops and one day they'll lock it away. There's no reason they had to wait for the start of the AS transition to do it either. Over the Intel era we saw them lock things down with the introduction of the T1 and T2 chips. AS was another small leap. Maybe M4 will introduce something else like software fuses to prevent rollback or something.

T1 was just for Touch ID. T2 did change a lot, but SIP is still as easy to disable as it was before T2. When Apple Silicon came out with a completely different boot process, they still allowed disabling SIP (and added the ability to do it per OS instead of at a global level), and despite the secure boot, they give you the option to turn that off and boot whatever you want (see Asahi Linux). I doubt they would have put the engineering effort into that if their plan was to lock the Mac down.

They even made quiet updates that helped the Asahi Linux project. I agree, it’s not going to be totally locked down anytime soon.