You get compression at the low end. It’s not especially cost effective to maintain manufacturing capacity for a bunch of similar designs. If I can make better margins on a $5 part than I can my $4.25 part I’m going to be really tempted to shut down that line and make more of the other or a higher margin chip.

That’s part of the story with Linux on BIOS. Motherboards started shipping with EEPROMs that were 2-4x larger than the BIOS would ever get, as big or bigger than typical rescue disks.