You don't have to allow all users everything, but you should allow those who want, to do as they please.
You can always hide the option behind some kind of mechanism. A mechanism a general user wouldn't use because they don't if the rest works as intended. Those who still do, should suffer the consequences, but this is not the manufacturers' problem. They have all kinds of safeguards to prevent liability because of those "special choices".
People would go to great lengths to follow tutorials on the internet to disable things they were told were bad for them. The less qualified, the more likely that they fell for the "updates are bad, they ruin your computer" narrative. As long as there's an option that can be abused, people will be tricked into allowing it.
This is less relevant for the current discussion about the FireTV and this feature. It's for the more general discussion of being able to do whatever you want on a device you own.
But why should everyone else suffer because of that small fraction?
The real answer: users are captive. For the vendors, they're cattle. And like with any good big farm, it does not matter how much it sucks for the cattle - but it does matter the cattle is safe, because few bad cases can become known and risk your farm getting shut down.
'Krasnol argued for keeping powerful/dangerous features, but making them opt-in (and a bit of a hassle to enable). You countered that there will be "some fraction" of users incapable of not hurting themselves with those features, who "will still stumble upon it anyways and will still refuse to take any responsibility for enabling it". My counter to that is that we shouldn't remove such power features just because "some fraction" may find and misuse them.
That's the should/should not part. The rest is my take on why companies remove those features anyway - they have no incentive to provide anything above bare minimum, especially not when they could be on the hook for "some fraction"'s mishaps.
I didn't raise the 'should/should not part' at all, you are the one who raised the point. I'm focused on actual facts and possibilities in this comment chain.
You don't have to allow all users everything, but you should allow those who want, to do as they please.
You can always hide the option behind some kind of mechanism. A mechanism a general user wouldn't use because they don't if the rest works as intended. Those who still do, should suffer the consequences, but this is not the manufacturers' problem. They have all kinds of safeguards to prevent liability because of those "special choices".