Ummm, as an engineer I can tell you that all these components are usually vital. Design engineers do not put resistors on a board because they are pretty - everything is there for a reason, whether it's to current-limit, impedance match a signal, provide a default logic level (pull-up/down), do a voltage-scaling operation, or just to dampen out an impulse step function. A computer system will hang just as dead with a bad resistor, as it will with a bad processor.
If you get a Double-Bus Fault, everthing comes to a stop. All it takes is for a single illegal bit of data to be on the bus twice in a row; and the show comes to an immediate halt. This is a non-maskable interrupt (NMI) - immediate crash, non-recoverable. With a bad resistor, capacitor and whatnot - this is what you are going to have on a permanent condition. A re-boot won't fix it.
Yes. But capacitors, resistors, buses, etc. are commodities. Don’t like the PRC? For a bit more, you can get them from elsewhere by the bucket full.
More importantly, from a “007ish” viewpoint, they don’t manipulate data - you can’t hide a cache on them and run the hidden instructions later (I hope...).