Depends on the drive. Early drive firmwares were unencrypted and left debug features available. Modern drives use encrypted firmware and have the debug modes disabled. If you’ve got one of those early firmwares, you’re good to go. If not, you’ll need to patch your drive.

However, “encrypted” is fairly weak compared to, say, a game console when the key is the same for all drives and there’s no hardware-level anti-rollback…

As a result, it was fairly easily defeated on modern drives. Find key, decrypt firmware, make changes, re-encrypt, update. Thanks MediaTek for keeping the same flawed legally-approved chip architecture for almost a decade.