They removed it because they lost money on every console sold unless you also bought some games. When governments/universities started buying thousands to use in compute clusters without buying a single game, it stopped being worth it.

They added it to avoid game console specific tariffs, so they must have run the numbers and realized paying those would cost less than subsidizing a bunch of clusters.

No they didn't, you couldn't run games since you had no access to the GPU. The whole exploiting and homebrew CFW shenanigangs followed after Sony (illegally) removed the option for OtherOS.