This is exactly what I feared Intel would do: Sabotage their own hardware by tying them to their shrinking eco system. Which is crazy - I am rooting for Intel here to get more competition, but would never buy it given this behaviour.

But this is more than stupid self-sabotage: This is a vendor forcing the use of proprietary and surveillance enabling software on a hardware level to receive updates. Similar to what Android does with blocking backing apps on custom roms, but I don't think this happened yet on the PC platform. Dark future ahead.

This is FUD. You did not need ME to update the firmware.

pcie resizable bar also works only on intel hardware despite being standard pcie feature available for ~5 years now (Zen 1).