> Your computer's awful implementation says nothing about UEFI as a whole
This is just a copout. Of course the crappy implementations many people have to deal with cast the whole thing in a bad light. If nothing else, UX is a distant-to-nonexistent concern of the UEFI standards, and that's part of the problem.
However, you are also right that this doesn't hardly make UEFI any worse than BIOS.
Needing to do special Windows boot and somehow wiping the boot config has nothing to do with the standard.
UX is meaningless for a boot mechanism standard. You cannot apply the same requirements to all UEFI devices. Tablets need touch-sensitive operations that work without keyboards. Servers need headless management with detailed configuration available through remote management. Desktops and laptops a mix of both. Managed Linux environments such as Chromebooks need a whole different sort of boot mechanism where the user has minimal control.
The update delivery mechanism is specified already. Wiping user settings can also be a necessity. Could be to prevent malicious firmware downgrades, could be to clear out NVRAM-triggered exploits, or maybe because the update necessitated restructuring configuration or whatnot.
Plus, as many have probably already noticed, the UEFI spec is more of a suggestion anyway. The only party bothering to check it might be Microsoft, and even then they only care about the parts that make Windows work. No matter how good or specific your spec is, a shoddy company will release shoddy firmware for it.
> UX is meaningless for a boot mechanism standard.
Well, all I can really say to this is that yes, this attitude is exactly the problem here.
Of course, the world looks different now than it did 25-30 years ago, and all Intel really set out to do back then was to get away from BIOS and all of its limitations. This was especially important for their now-defunct "IA-64" (Itanium) project, but it ended up lasting anyway due to x86-64 happening.
Nevertheless, for most of us, UEFI rolled out in the 2010s, at a time when Internet connectivity was generally a given, and hardware capabilities had already moved well beyond where they were when Intel handed the matter off to UEFI in the 2000s.
Hardware makers have consistently shown contempt for software and user experience, regarding it somebody else's problem. Of course, a consortium of many hardware makers is not likely to develop opinions or sentiments that none of them individually would have. But it does show how parochial and short-sighted they were and often continue to be.
Yes, there are multiple different platforms that use UEFI. They can each have their own standard way of using it, though.
This is just a copout. Of course the crappy implementations many people have to deal with cast the whole thing in a bad light. If nothing else, UX is a distant-to-nonexistent concern of the UEFI standards, and that's part of the problem.
However, you are also right that this doesn't hardly make UEFI any worse than BIOS.