Just in the spirit of clarity here, I think while it's important to note that although Ledger's communication has been terrible and their marketing repeated this notion - the belief that a secure element could never reveal private keys in any form regardless of what firmware was thrown at it was and has always been incorrect.
But it's what Ledger had been telling us since day one:
Exactly. And people that didn't know better believed it. The rest knew that what this really meant was with an asterisk attached: "*so long as no firmware commands it". I don't fault people for taking it verbatim, most users had no reason to question the wording or dig any deeper. But the truth is there was never anything so magical about Ledger hardware which prevented firmware from extracting the seed.
My main point here is that Ledger is now using this fact (which is now more common knowledge than it was prior to the Recover announcement) to liken trusting their Recover service to trusting any other hardware wallet. "You have to trust any hardware wallet so what's the big deal if we have Recover firmware?" as if trusting Recover is the same as trusting any SE. Levels of trust are not all equal but Ledger is gaslighting people into thinking the recover mechanism requires the same level of trust as any hardware wallet and that's so false. They're using this false equivalence trickery to calm the waters and it seems to be working, sadly.