I've read literally dozens about how Intel ME is a potential vector and it's problematic to have, particularly when unneeded on consumer devices (a number of them here on HN). There's whole discussions about it from people like Libreboot and others who work on fully open systems. Every security professional I've worked with has been aware that there's a potential hardware level backdoor you can't wipe out the firmware for without bricking your machine, and has opinions about it.
I typed "Intel management engine second computer" in to Google, and found articles calling it a privacy/security threat and potential backdoor ranging back to 2010/2011 timeframe on the first page of results. (That's not even a good phrase to search with to find info, I just wanted to prove the point that you can find pieces with literally the first thing that comes to mind.)
It seems super useful to me. It lets you do OS installs without a keyboard/screen using VNC. Note that stuff like IPMI is standard in the server world.
I certainly see the benefit in the server world (eg, managing a data center) and even in the corporate one (eg, managing a lot of workstations), and didn't mean to imply that everyone thought it was a negative. (Though, even in that space, some people do because of the closed source nature where they don't have full control of the system.)
Rather, I meant that everyone who was serious about security was aware that it was there and included it in their threat modeling. It's not worse than other remote management technologies (and may be better, depending on your needs and trade-offs).
However, for certain systems, there's never a need for the remote management capabilities, and hence represents a threat for which there's no upside when included. (I would argue most consumer systems fall under this.)
There are of course, a range of opinions depending on ideological bent, and my main point was that there was a discussion about it happening.
