And here’s the argument that I already voiced: vetting hardware is not practical. Vetting operator’s capabilities is, and this is the function that the current implementation of vetting actually performs.
Note that a skilled operator may be able to move a node from a failing hardware. Is this not a prefered action, as opposed to fail the node and run all of the repair traffic? Especially knowing that skilled operators will operate larger nodes, so the impact of the repair traffic on the network would be bigger. Yet this is something you suggest to ban.