For the typical user, this is far far far more likely to happen than that they would “pop out” the drive and read it in another machine.

Defaults should be safe for most users. Power users are exactly the people who can deal with changing a setting. It’s constantly surprising to me when technical people insist that defaults should be optimized for technical people.

This is not the correct model. For a typical user, they can bring the laptop to someone knowledgeable, who will pop out the drive for them.

The main question is: What is the biggest risk: theft or data corruption.

In my experience, corruption and ransomware is more common so FDE should be off for households desktops or laptops, as these rarely leave the house. A business tends to have managed devices and data loss is a legal nightmare, so FDE should be on. The main thing is: people should be able to choose.