People maintaining their own cars used to be a prolific practice, but I think we're better off now with cars that require dramatically less maintenance.
Unfortunately the IOT market is in a bad situation because products are advertised as not requiring any maintenance but they aren't reliable enough to live up to that.
We could have automatic updates. There is nothing technical preventing that from happening.
People defragmenting their NTFS filesystems used to be a prolific practice, but I think we're better off now with filesystems that require dramatically less maintenance.
My point is that the only thing holding us back is politics: manufacturers think that it is in their best interest to sell routers with proprietary firmware, even though it really isn't.
Unfortunately the IOT market is in a bad situation because products are advertised as not requiring any maintenance but they aren't reliable enough to live up to that.