No, you are missing the context of the earlier paragraph, which says &quot;Well, there are tools that actually want to write it.&quot; so it needs to be accessible in some way.  Making it <i>truly</i> read-only is not really feasible, and goes against the Unix philosophy of &quot;root can do anything.&quot;  That&#x27;s not to say that we shouldn&#x27;t make it <i>harder</i> for root to do some things, such as brick your system.  In the end, the fix still doesn&#x27;t prevent root from bricking a system in the case the firmware is badly coded, it just makes it a bit harder.  Mounting read-only by default or defaulting all files to immutable until changed by chattr are not hard hurdles to overcome for root, but they the do make it <i>harder</i> than it would be without them, which in this case is a good thing.<p>&gt; ... so running &quot;rm -rf &#x2F;&quot; as root should brick your motherboard because it&#x27;s the responsibility of the motherboard manufacturer to protect against this.<p>You are assuming &quot;only writable by root&quot; means &quot;root can write without any restrictions&quot; which is a fairly uncharitable reading, and requires assumptions about his intent which are not evident.<p>I could make a statement such as &quot;cars in the united states can only be legally driven by people of an appropriate age&quot; and you could <i>assume</i> I meant that&#x27;s all that needs to apply and start calling out my statement as wrong, or you could assume I was aware of the additional requirement of a driver&#x27;s license, or you could ask me to clarify my point of view.  I just don&#x27;t believe the first option is conducive to useful discussion, nor do I think it&#x27;s appropriate to use assumed information in a negative way towards a third party.<p>Edit: s&#x2F;disparage&#x2F;use assumed information in a negative way&#x2F; for lack of better phrasing coming to mind.  The statement wasn&#x27;t really disparaging, just an uncharitable interpretation, so I don&#x27;t want to overstate that.