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> UEFI standard supports > loading from FAT.

Actually UEFI REQUIRES the bootable partition to be FAT (not not exFAT).

UEFI also requires the executables to be in the COFF format ( instead of the normal ELF one ) too.

What makes ELF normal? Funnily COFF also comes from Unix.

And IIRC, FAT being in the UEFI specification kind of solved the patent issue over FAT being in the Linux kernel tree.

EFI System and /boot are often the same partition, but they don't have to be, GRUB can boot a kernel and initramfs off most common linux filesystems (and less common ones like xfs, hfs and reiser), it can even decrypt a LUKS partition.

A liveusb using FAT+SYSLINUX/Grub4DOS/whatever has another really good reason: it's readable (and probably writable) from anywhere.

I.e. my EDC flash disk has FAT32-formatted first partition, yet is bootable. This is surprisingly versatile.