[jcrawfordor]

Most firmware updates on motherboards today happen via A/B partitions, so a power failure during update is automatically recoverable on the next boot. This has been done specifically to enable automatic updates triggered from the OS, as e.g. MacOS has done for some time. The difficulty of firmware updates has become a real practical problem since the more complex firmware used today is more likely to need fixes for system stability, and support gets tired of handling a dozen cases a day that are problems already fixed in newer firmware.

Automatic firmware updates have become pretty common on hardware from big OEMs for several years now.