Because you don't own them. Because you never actually owned them. You've never been told how your chipset works, or how your CPUs transpiler works, or what that extra chip that has system level access above ring 0 does, how to modify it, or how to disable it until people randomly found the magic bit to turn it off.
You don't know what your hard drive firmware does or how secure it actually is. You don't know what the controllers on your RAM sticks are doing. You have no way to find out, either, because its all proprietary.
It doesn't even matter that you are not really able to modify the firmware on RAM or in a hard drive, and that it takes way more work than almost any individual is capable of to actually even try to verify the firmware on any of these devices regardless of if you have the purported source code or not.
Its all magic, its all black boxes, and you have no control over any of it, which is why companies regularly volunteer just going one step further all the time - they already have power over your hardware, what is a bit more amidst everything else being an obscured secret?
The physical silicon is almost worthless. What's valuable is how you can use it; and there too I suspect "you don't own it" is hyperbole - but perhaps not entirely, given all IP involved. What's certainly not hyperbole is that you are not in control and that this lack of control can be a feature to others (e.g. DRM). Whether you legally would be allowed to mod your chip to "unlock" it is moot if you simply don't have that ability.
It's one thing to lack the knowledge to use the device. It's another to lack the authority, if said knowledge could be acquired or reverse engineered. If I own the device, I should be allowed to send whatever control bits I want.
I understand the DMCA and related laws change this, but that is a flaw of our legal system that needs to be corrected.
You don't know what your hard drive firmware does or how secure it actually is. You don't know what the controllers on your RAM sticks are doing. You have no way to find out, either, because its all proprietary.
It doesn't even matter that you are not really able to modify the firmware on RAM or in a hard drive, and that it takes way more work than almost any individual is capable of to actually even try to verify the firmware on any of these devices regardless of if you have the purported source code or not.
Its all magic, its all black boxes, and you have no control over any of it, which is why companies regularly volunteer just going one step further all the time - they already have power over your hardware, what is a bit more amidst everything else being an obscured secret?