It
is true that this is ultimately a hardware/firmware problem, but if the solution is waiting for motherboard manufacturers to not have bugs or stupid designs, then we will be waiting forever. Badly designed hardware will always exist.
If you look at how probing for hardware works in the Linux kernel, quite a few older drivers (and the occasional feature subtree) have auto-probing disabled by default because it tended to crash some types of hardware. You see this again in lm_sensors, where the auto-probe script specifically asks permission (with a default "no") before it tries certain probes that risk crashing the hardware.
We don't see this as much in recent years as hardware has gotten better - listing the device_ids/vendor_ids on a buss is much safer than poking ISA IO ports - but the problem remains. Some hardware needs special hand-holding, especially in the initial probe or initialize stages. Hence, tools that handle those stages are always going to have special cases and other annoyances.
> the amount of flack being received doesn't seem warranted
The flack against Pottering (and the rest of the systemd cabal) is because this isn't the first time his idealism has caused serious problems for others. Yes, it would be nice if we could just mount UEFI areas (or anything else). In reality, as this bug shows, this is dangerous behavior. It should have been made optional, or the entire idea of exposing those UEFI areas as a filesystem should have been reconsidered - a special purpose tool that handled bugged hardware might have been more appropriate.