Every guide I’ve seen recommends turning off the kill switches before flashing an image to the Librem 5 — why is that? I’ve successfully flashed with them on. Thanks in advance.
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My guess is that it does not really matter at all, but it’s perhaps still good to specify something in a reflashing guide because otherwise people will wonder about it, and you want the guide to say exactly what to do and avoid any misunderstandings. And turning off things that are not needed is often a good idea, then there are fewer things left to worry about. 
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Minimizing chances of elevated power consumption to maximize chances of successful outcome even in presence of some issues and suboptimal conditions.
Same with taking the battery out to enter flashing mode - usually not needed at all, but it deals with multitude of edge cases that won’t be obvious to someone who doesn’t know well how the hardware works.
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The official guide specifically addresses your question (text originally contributed by me).
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This is wonderful, I believe I was reading the blog/Jumpdrive/Mobian directions.
Here is the snippet from the docs:
The motivation for disabling the hardware kill switches in this procedure is to minimize power consumption. This maximize the chances of a successful boot even with a deeply depleted battery and under-powered USB source. It is entirely possible that this procedure will work even if you do not operate the kill switches as described.
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