Firmware problems don't have to be severe enough to put human lives at risk to be a real problem. There are tons of examples of bad firmware leading to broken power or thermal management leading to crippled performance or battery life or excessive fan noise. WiFi NICs have subsumed large parts of the network driver stack and in doing so have made it impossible to implement effective QoS, leaving users stuck with stupid radio behaviors that hurt the performance of every device operating on the same channel.

None of what I'm proposing would lead to a bios update every month, except in the initial period of fixing the worst of the manufacturer's mistakes. "Firmware" as I'm using it would still be trying to present a stable interface to the rest of the system and not inherently be a moving target of constant feature creep in addition to the bug fixes.