> you may be able to prevent it from booting while still allowing the rest of the system to run, but probably not.

To be clear, this is not a technical side-effect of some incidental reliance of the boot process on the management engine (ME). Instead, Intel has deliberately made it impossible for consumers to disable the ME, has obfuscated how the ME works, and offered ME-disabled computers only to "military, government and intelligence agencies".

All under the guise that "Intel considers disabling ME to be a security vulnerability, as a malware could abuse it to make the computer lose some of the functionality that the typical user expects, such as the ability to play media with DRM" - which is beyond laughable.

In short, it could not be more obvious that the ME is malicious.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine