Comment by jasomill

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.