As someone who might be plowed into by one of these things, I care about the difference. Is it something where 80% of them will be automatically fixed within 72 hours by an auto-update, or is it something I’ll need to worry about for weeks/months. There’s no way to know which recalls have been fixed when encountering a vehicle in the wild, so if it’s a software-only recall fix that applies automatically, I feel less concerned about it once the fix is available.

None of this should be taken as support of recklessly shipping unfinished software into a car.