Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the past discussions of the ME here and elsewhere, there have always been people making self-assured poo-pooing noises about what a trivial nonissue it is, make deceptive claims about exposure, and then dumb claims about how you can't trust any hardware. They never reply to particular questions that might point out how deceptive the arguments are.
I'm one of the people that claims you can't trust hardware. Care to elaborate why that's not the case. How does one trust a chip with 14nm transistors? Are you claiming that one can 'simply' decap the chip and examine it with a microscope on a Saturday night? How do I then trust that the chip I have in hand is of the same architecture as the one you decapped and examined?
That is the argument I am asserting is dumb. And it is obviously dumb; in adversarial contests, you don't leave weaknesses exposed just because you might have other weaknesses[1]. It also ignores the presence of differential threats; I may not care about hypothetical compromised NICs because my use case my not require a network, but need anti-evil-maid defenses.
Bottom line: in the context of discussing whether or not the ME is dangerous in the general case, other potential hardware threats are irrelevant, and I believe the argument is one used to intentionally muddy the waters.
[1] Putting aside deeper strategies; I'm not going to argue about game theory here.