I was thinking of hardware engineers putting little NOT transistors on the D-bus of the flash chip, before attaching it to the system bus, so that a 0x00 on the system bus would be reas as 0xFF by the chip viceque versa. That would’ve been useful in this case.
But alas, if it isn’t… someone has to deal with it. (And the other comments suggest that the state may not be the same everywhere, so blindly XORing with FFh in the kernel will also not be a solution.)