Indeed, what a shame. Firmware is so crappy that deleting variables bricks it, and the Linux kernel decides to expose those variables as a filesystem so that a simple shell command like rm -rf will actually delete EFI variables, instead of exposing them via ioctl like FreeBSD did [1]. As you can see, if systemd hadn't been invented there would be no problem.
[1] https://reviews.freebsd.org/rS307070