Perhaps's it's unclear from reading the zdnet article, but anyhow, the idea is not to replace Minix in the ME, but rather get rid of, or at least disable, the M

Perhaps's it's unclear from reading the zdnet article, but anyhow, the idea is not to replace Minix in the ME, but rather get rid of, or at least disable, the ME as much as possible, then replace the upper levels of the UEFI stack + the bootloader with a minimal Linux + u-root userspace. When the final distro kernel is booted by the firmware one, it replaces it. The firmware Linux kernel is thus NOT left running anywhere in the background doing insidious things.