>The mysterious thing to me was why they ever tried to reinvent this part of the procedure

You definitely have enough info to figure this out, but let me walk you through it.

What is the profit margin on the business of transporting or distributing commodity energy like electricity or a tanker full of gas? Not very good. It's a commodity, so you can't do much to improve your margins without someone else undercutting you.

Modern Businesses in America do not like the small profit margin of selling commodities. They like the "tech" standard of insisting that an app is a "Platform" or community and being able to extract whatever rent you want from it.

So they tried to control a "Platform" through the cars. It somewhat failed because it's finally a bridge too far for consumers, just barely.

Basically, a classic horror story of consumer rights is "What if your ford car only worked with ford gas?" which was not something possible to really do back in the early 1900s, but companies saw an opportunity to do exactly that with EVs, and they don't care that it made things worse and slower to roll out and harmed adoption, because there was a chance of infinite money!