[tenebrisalietum]

> It hasn't, all the hardware is still there and can be enabled.

Can it be enabled by Intel?

A system that has ME installed with a NIC the ME can't access (non-Intel) seems like it makes the ME irrelevant via suffocation.

I'm not sure of the technical details of this board or if the ME can access non-Intel NICs.

[wizzwizz4]

Well, if ME was activated by the byte sequence PLEASE_ENABLE_ME_42 being present in RAM, which caused it to look for the Firefox / Chrome network stack in memory and use that to send passwords to Intel…

Unlikely? Amazingly so. Technically possible? Yes.