Yeah, with a couple of podcasts I listen to, when the Honey stuff came out they did a whole thing about it and dropped Honey mid cycle, probably at a pretty big cost to themselves.
It still mildly irritates me because I had suspected they were doing this for a long time, but I can't really fault the podcasts I listen to for how they handled it.
Your OS can load the microcode. Most Linux distros will load the latest microcode during boot. Some will even update the microcode when it gets the new microcode from the distro repositories. This facility exists specifically because motherboard vendors are terrible about providing updates.