I'm still pretty skeptical about all this. Has Ledger put out any official statement or something that says the seed phrase won't be sent anywhere unless we subscribe to their monthly plan? However, even if such confirmation exists, we should still question whether we have any means of independently verifying this claim or if we're simply relying on their word. The mere possibility of the seed phrase leaving the hardware device and potentially being accessible online, in any form, undermines the fundamental purpose of a hardware wallet, which is to serve as the sole custodian of our private keys.
It's impossible to trust anything they say right now. If a software update can enable remote access to your seed, it means the option to do that was always there because they didn't release a new device or needed to change the hardware. They just didn't use the sleeping seed-share option, or perhaps, no one forced them to use it. If they can enable such a feature with the user's consent, what stops them from enabling it without the user's consent if the user doesn't want to use it? All they have now is a promise they can't do it, but their words and guarantees are worth very little at this stage.
No matter how stupid it all sounds, this is still a positive thing. At least now we all know how unsafe it is and that there is a possibility of a backdoor, and this is a serious reason to completely abandon this product.
It's much more serious and goes further than that. If Ledger has an option to do that through the secure element they are using in their devices, the other manufacturers using the same or similar SE can also do it. Ledger just showed us that everything we thought we knew about hardware wallet security is false. One firmware upgrade can change everything. Who is to say you'll even have an option to reject this nonsense in the future, be it from Ledger or a competitor?