This is an argument of nuances, but I would make the point that the design and software / firmware stages provide fundamentally different capabilities than manu

This is an argument of nuances, but I would make the point that the design and software / firmware stages provide fundamentally different capabilities than manufacturing. You have entire industries around supply chain assurance, so manufacturing corruption is still an issue (although usually more targeted at lower-cost, replaced components). But as the post-SuperMicro reporting laid out, it's an order of magnitude more difficult to embed physical components on a board, in an undetected manner, that create covert communication channels. Vs doing so at privileged software layers.