I don't trust the media fully either, but I think that if a proper remote execution vulnerability would have been found, and also exploited en masse, that would

I don't trust the media fully either, but I think that if a proper remote execution vulnerability would have been found, and also exploited en masse, that would surely make the news. And if there wasn't, for 16 years, then I think we can assume that the thing is not more rickety than the rest of human constructed reality. Also, please note that the discussion is not about possibility. It was explicitly stated that "Every modern CPU does this", and here, "this" refers to "calls home with full access to your everything". Now, that is patently false.