Exactly. In modeling the threat that the ME poses to a libre system, the ideal would be to have it "gone," such that it will never activate regardless of what is in the BIOS flash.
That's not possible, but the next best thing is to have it never activate unless major changes are made to the BIOS flash, and those changes should be very visible.
Your computer suddenly reboots: very visible.
The flash partition table and/or BIOS suddenly change: very visible.
# shutdown -r now
?