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I think you missed a few words there: "with a boot loader that netboots signed images".

They won't be relying on the BIOS netboot that picks up the first DHCP server, but rather a custom bootloader that will check the signature on the image before running it.

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Which you can't really trust for the same reason.

Why not? If you're writing the bootloader (or using one that's trustworthy and open source) and deploying it by yourselves then it should be relatively safe. An attacker would have to have physical access to the hardware, or some method of modifying the bootloader on disk.

Unfortunately, for this use case the attacker that users are worried about are also the ones that will be installing the bootloader on the server in the first place. I don't see, from a computer science point of view, a process for verification that can't be emulated by the system that runs it.

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