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A physical switch can be locally toggled by the device owner/admin.

Some motherboards offer a physical jumper for firmware updates, including x86 PC Engines APU2 coreboot router.

So here's another problem. Going back to the point made earlier in this thread "users don't care much about their routers." The average user opens their router page exceedingly rarely, which is the benefit of automatic updates. I set up my mom's router, and she works in IT (more in project management these days, so she's fallen into being a mostly non-technical user.) And she still texts me every time she needs to get into it to ask me what the password I set up was... once every few years. The downfall of automatic updates is obviously something like the case of the article this discussion is about. But weigh up the costs and benefits, in my opinion, the scale tips more towards automatic updates when you factor in all the critical level vulnerabilities that router OS's have accrued over the years.

Some consumer routers (e.g. Amazon eero) have moved to cloud/app config and automatic updates.

A read-only partition can bootstrap recovery from cloud, if the main firmware or config is damaged.

Some updates are possible with live kernel patching of the memory-resident OS, which can also be used by malware.

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