Yeah I see that all the time for firmware updates. They don’t want to have to replace your product if you’re an idiot and unplug it or something.

Unless you live in a place with inherently unreliable power, or are flashing in the middle of a thunderstorm/tornado/hurricane/typhoon/earthquake/etc, Flashing is relatively safe as long as you follow directions.

And those risk could be completely eliminated with a dual bios setup, where even if there WAS a failure, it could fall back on the other bios and still work flawlessly. or even better, let you flash the currently inactive one, and switches that to primary upon successful flash. I think even flashback lets you recover from a corrupted bios, too?

So yes, it circles around back to them being cheap and having problems with their process, because they are cheap.

If the brain is functioning as expected, a brain transplant is ill-advised as risk to reward doesnt make sense.... But computers

Nah, it's not that risky if your tooling and process is solid. I have thousands of edge devices out in the field doing firmware updates on carrier boards from a specific manufacturer and have never had one fail or brick in update. Why? Because their tooling is absolutely fantastic and pretty bulletproof.

Even a simple {checksum>transfer>checksum>write>checksum} is pretty safe, UNLESS...you know the carrier you're flashing doesnt have the ability to do so, in which case, you definitely put a warning like this on your product because you know it has a penchant for failure.