I'm not saying that RYF is entirely useless, just that "new version requires firmware blobs, old one didn't" is a clearer and stronger statement than mentioning RYF IMHO.
I mentioned ryf certification because Tallos II and Talos II Lite are the only ryf-certified modern systems available. Also, I bet FSF is very strict when certifying systems so we don't have to rely on the word of the vendor only.
POWER10 could probably game RYF certification. Raptor is really much stricter than everyone on that topic. If you make bits of firmware non-upgradeable, I believe you can pass them as RYF-certified even if they are blobs - they are counted as part of the hardware.
Raptor didn't accept anything like that, closest is the minimal (it's a RISC after all) microcode mask rom in POWER9 core that AFAIK is effectively covering some hairy and rarely used instructions as multiple standard Power instructions. And it's so small thing that I am not really sure it's there...
