But isn't this whole privacy issue more a topic for libreboot?
No. I think privacy matters a lot and it has always been part of the coreboot emphasis.
I personally don't agree that the extra measures libreboot takes are necessary and in some ways the libreboot measures are not sufficient -- they don't free the EC on most of those laptops IIUC, whereas the EC *is* free on chromebooks, which libreboot does not consider "free". Hence, from my point of view, libreboot requires something -- no microcode blobs -- that I think does not matter; and for all kinds of reasons they are not able to free the EC on their systems, and I think that's pretty important.
This is a really hard problem and lots of people are trying to get it right. We just don't all agree on the importance of some areas, microcode being one of them. But privacy is and always has been an area of interest to coreboot.
ron