Well, it's still a solution to problem which shouldn't exist in the first place. Before UEFI, x86 boxes were hard to brick unless you really knew what you were doing.
Now that you posted this, I think I recall one friend telling me that hibernation killed his laptop. But this was over 10 years ago and I only know about one such incident.
OTOH, what UEFI gave us is basically a portable and convenient API to brick any machine from any OS.
Difficulty in getting to the battery aside, he just did a regular CMOS reset, the standard technique for getting otherwise unusable systems back to a good state.