We are heading into an interesting future. The NSO Groups biggest owner Francisco Partners has both Software and Semiconductor companies in its portfolio, like Dell Software. Should I be worried about the firmware in my Dell computer? When everything becomes entangled like this it's impossible to know who to trust. And in the end it doesn't really matter what intent you have if people don't trust you.
Buy parts and run your own firewall/dns setup to drop anything odd.
Its honestly the only way to be "sure" if worry about a manufacturer doing that sort of thing. It won't be perfect but the odds of someone targeting you for hardware spyware is prettttttttty low. And most manufacturers of comp enthusiast parts know its suicide to do it mass-market like that.
