I don't think so - it's more a function of hardware becoming more complicated, and vendors choosing to put a lot of the logic in firmware rather than putting it in ROM because there's a much lower chance of them getting it right first time now than there was in the past.
ROM to firmware creep is understandable, given flexibility that you mentioned. But to an end-user, is there a difference between having a blob in ROM vs firmware, if both are closed source?
I don't think so. Every component on my system that runs firmware is significantly more complicated than the iterations that didn't. 802.11ax is much harder than 802.11b, for instance.
> But to an end-user, is there a difference between having a blob in ROM vs firmware, if both are closed source?
Yeah, bugs that are discovered after release can be fixed.
I definitely understand that real benefit.
But I was questioning the premise that having blob in ROM is somehow better than needing same blob in firmware, simply because that one doesn’t need/want to distribute non-free firmware on media.
If one wanted libre hardware, then both cases are not great.
Oh right! I absolutely believe that having non-free firmware on media is preferable - in some cases this has led to free implementations that replace the non-free firmware, and even outside that, given the choice between non-free code that doesn't work and non-free code that does, I'd prefer to take the latter.