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Is it possible that the enclave is in fact an ASIC with the crypto logic and udid burned into the silicon? That would ensure that it couldn't be updated or compromised, by Apple or anyone else.

This is pretty far outside my area of expertise, so that may be a very dumb question.

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It's likely implemented as a part of the System-on-Chip that Apple is using in their phones, yes, either reusing or is very similar to ARM's TrustZone extensions.

Since the Apple chip is derived from an ARM design it would make sense to have the secure enclave implemented with TrustZone rather than being provided as a separate piece of hardware. Most probably a TEE (Trusted Execution Environment). Lots of TEEs are based on L4.

Nope, it's a separate core, according to Apple.

Educated guess: it may be the application processor also has a trusted execution environment containing stubs that communicate with the Secure Enclave. This would prevent kernel level exploits from writing to the shared memory and mailboxes.

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