This is what we see with M2 vs M1 considering the die-to-die interconnects and even before M1 Max/Ultra etc were getting shipped things like the AIC being prese

This is what we see with M2 vs M1 considering the die-to-die interconnects and even before M1 Max/Ultra etc were getting shipped things like the AIC being present twice already did show us the amount of significant changes a single cycle (and even within a cycle!) can bring if you don't have the ball-and-chain of legacy standards to keep around for over three decades. We are pretty much living in the future here, getting consumer products with features that were bleeding edge and never seen before in servers just a couple of years ago. Backwards compatibility can be nice, but if implemented backwards it starts hurting your hardware development (and software adoption) pretty bad. As for reviewers/writers having bad takes, this keeps happening as long as they don't understand the goal that things were designed for. It's easy to always assume that big bad hardware corp made it so that you get the worst possible product for the highest possible price, but if we just take hardware pairing for a moment, this gives you two things: zero-trust guarantees ("just because the hardware is plugged in doesn't mean we trust it") and actual production (you have to actually have the keys to decrypt anything or prove ownership to the system, it's not just some pinky swear). As a downside, as long as PKI is the least-worst option we have for doing this, it means that Apple fully controls this (same as Intel with ME/BROM and AMD with BROM and AGESA), for which nobody really seems to have an alternate solution yet. Luckily for the big hardware companies, most users don't care and aren't really affected by it either. Unlike tractor repairs (those things tend to break frequently enough to warrant end-user expertise), the overlap of people that are in need of repairs and the people that have the expertise to do it is extremely thin.