It counters evil maid attacks.

Not really, if the evil maid is sophisticated enough to bring their own firmware to reflash your devices, they could also just swap the PCB containing the controller or solder in a new chip

I chose the word counters rather than eliminate for the reason you outlined.

If you're the vendor, you can add a tamper-resistant or tamper-evident design to raise the cost of ,component-replacement attacks. Which can be countered by whole-device replacement, which in turn is countered by device identity attestation, amd so on, in an endless arms-race.

Tamper-evident stuff and device attestation solve all these problems even without preventing reflashing. If you can't check if the device has been tampered with or replaced, preventing flashing won't help. If you can, you don't need to.

Means the Russians can't repurpose the washing machines to build drones.