Sub-total loss is presumably much more common and it’s useful there, but the adjustments to prevent it being disabled/make it more durable would be helpful there, too.
From the article: All of the preparation is, inarguably, effective: Never has a recovered black box been so badly damaged that it yields no usable data.
That seems to me like they might be at a sufficient level of durability already.
The recorders already to work really well for the purpose they're designed for.
The "bad actor in cockpit" plus "unexplained disappearance" scenario, for which they're not designed, simply doesn't happen often enough to be worthwhile worrying about.
Short version: flight recorders aren't broken, they don't need "fixing"
Long version: imagine you were to propose a major redesign to your employer's systems to attempt to diagnose unaccountable failures which based on historical data happen 0.00000018% of the time[0], what would be the response?
Maybe it doesn't nearly happen often enough to make this any kind of a priority?