You need to have the firmware equivalent of a platform team.
It's common now for medium and large companies to have some variant of a cloud platform team: People responsible for shared practices, infrastructure, and processes in the cloud.
Smart hardware companies have done the same for decades. You have a firmware platform team that handles things like update protocols, recovery protocols, testing checklists, on-device OTA update architecture, and other critical functions.
When you're a company like Samsung that continuously releases and develops products this actually increases your time to market rather than decreasing it. You let each product team focus on the parts of the firmware that make their product valuable and free them from having to roll their own update systems
Samsung has multiple such teams.
In my experience with the broader industry, platform teams are usually less than a dozen people who own millions of lines of mostly-external code. You don't usually get the luxury of careful deliberation and comprehensive testing because you're doing too busy putting out fires and chasing down manufacturer errata.
Samsung might be one of the good ones, but sadly most hardware manufacturers treat firmware and software like just another line item on the BOM. Like a screw or a silicon gasket: Source it from some "supplier," spoon it into the product somewhere on the assembly line, and then never touch it again. I've seen a hardware manufacturer that doesn't even use source control or branching. When they have a new hardware product, they take the software that is closest in functionality, hack it until it works with the new hardware, and then set the software back on the shelf until next time.
It's almost exact same thing as purchasing an insurance.
If the management folks have personal health insurance, surely they must understand the concept and the need. And this is a much better deal because unlike actual insurance this is more like "invest once, enjoy forever" type of thing. And multi-stage boot chain, recovery partition and staged rollouts are not some rocket science that needs some serious expertise.
Yet, here we go. Humans are not really rational actors after all, and collective humans are even less so.
I suppose the closest equivalent would be motherboards with dual BIOS.
There if something goes wrong during an update, you always have a backup BIOS with the previous version (not necessarily factory settings). If the system fails to boot, it automatically switches to the backup BIOS and restores the main BIOS to the last working version.
