alt Hacker News> just getting around shitty practices like this
That is the hope; although we'll end up with either companies doubling down on cryptography to prevent this (though they will inevitably leave some holes), or changing business models, where the hardware loss leader -> subscription is no longer a thing, so hardware costs go up
On the flip side, there are companies going the other way and just dumping the hardware on the market expecting the community to vibecode up the firmware. We had open hardware like this before but it was not practical for anyone to actually do anything with it unless there was a massive community maintaining firmwares.