This operates under the assumption that cars produced before the era of OTA updates could not have been improved by OTA updates. I’ve used a few of them, and that doesn’t seem to be the case.

But imagine if some dork could push largely untested control system updates to your car’s ECU…

While I can’t deny that this isn’t categorically impossible, it seems incredibly unlikely. At the very least, I don’t think we’ve seen this happen yet, and OTA updates have been around for a while now.