The main reason is ultimately there are new laptops every few months. Would this genuinely be expected to become Hardware Guides?
What determines a good laptop in terms of privacy? We make the point that security is what enforces privacy. So a vendor should be expected to provide updates, (to their firmware), good security features.
I wrote about that here and in fact I would make the point that a laptop with only partially working ME is probably less private than one with vPro/Ryzen Pro, Encrypted RAM, and those other features seen on higher end business laptops.
The frankly silly perspective that ME is somehow going to make a laptop less private is really based on absolutely nothing but some old rubbish and paranoia from free software advocates that don’t really know anything.
If they (the vendor) make the hardware and want to put a backdoor in it, then they will and it will simply be somewhere where you don’t even know and can’t do anything about it.
Notice the conversation never comes up when talking about AMD PSP or Apple hardware? That’s because the furor was about ME and and the people that harp on about it never think that every platform has something like this, just with a different name.