Learning what exactly? How to type 'sudo ./flash'? Oh come on. Modifying the BIOS himself let him delve into technical details far more than flashing some ready-made BIOS ever would. And it's knowledge that can be used to interact with other BIOS's as well. The specific detail of where the whitelist is irrelevant - what's important is finding out how to dump the BIOS, how to open/read it, learning enough about UEFI to not get completely lost, how to make changes, how to sign it (or not) and get it working with the modified version. This is knowledge that one can apply to any number of devices with UEFI. Knowledge of how to flash coreboot is limited to the handful of devices that the developers have ported it to, and everybody else is just shit out of luck (aside from the fact that you haven't learned anything).
Clearly you have no idea what you are talking about. Installing coreboot requires extracting existing firmware, locating and extracting blobs from it, removing ME, configuring coreboot and payload(s). They could even patch any of the things along the way to add additional functionality (e.g. tianocore actually breaks fairly often, and requires debugging and patching).
Yea, the author learned some things, but that doesn't mean all other options are "learn nothing" (even if they are for you).
I checked for the instructions on the ThinkPad T60. Literally sudo flash. I also flashed it on my Chromebook, which was utterly trivial. These are ready-made solutions that don't require more than two brain cells to apply.
