> I don't understand why this would be "daft".

Because AFAIK you still need macOS to periodically update the firmware and binary blobs that supports the house of cards. That doesn't sound like the premium Linux experience it's cracked up to be.

This is hardly a Mac-specific problem: countless devices require or recommend booting to DOS, an EFI shell, or from a custom vendor-supplied boot imnage to update firmware, or to the system's firmware setup utility, even on Windows PCs and x86 Linux, and given the wide variety of PC hardware, even in cases where native OS firmware update tools exist, they may not always work.

In other words, think of macOS as a somewhat bloated vendor-supplied firmware update tool. "Premium" is subjective, but I wouldn't personally limit my options for SSDs or storage controllers to those that supply Linux firmware update tools, so why should I do so with laptops?

And dual booting to a small native OS partition and auto-updating is hardly less convenient than manually downloading firmware, creating an appropriately configured USB boot disk, and installing it by rebooting and invoking a vendor-supplied tool by hand from a DOS or EFI command prompt.

> This is hardly a Mac-specific problem

This is the craziest cope ever.

Having to dual-boot a copy of macOS is quite literally a Mac-specific problem.

UEFI updates can be pulled off a FAT32 thumb drive, natively.