Comment by mdspan
21 hours ago
Could you elaborate on what you mean by "don't interact with hardware much anymore"? If you compare modern drivers with similar ones from 20 years ago, for example, you'll find the modern ones tend to be quite a bit more complex.
No directly anyway, for the OS it's all abstractions and isolation. There was a time when the OS could basically see and control everything, but now there are subsystems all over the place with their own memory, their own software, all outside of the control of the OS. CSME runs while the computer is powered off.