ME is literally just a bios, amd has its own version but its identical, obviously the bios has full system and hardware access, its always been like this, thats literally what a fucking bios is
every cpu for the past 20 years had their own bios, programmers used to even execute bios interrupt calls in assembly to do all kinds of things instead of dealing with the os or hardware, almost every graphical program abused 13h bios calls to write directly to the frambuffer instead of dealing with the absolute shit display drivers of the time
everything you read about ME is an inside joke making fun of computer illiterate linux "gurus" that think they know computers but really only know program manuals and bash scripting