That's the way the world generally works with literally everything else, so yes. Physical crimes like theft are punished after the fact and for the most part that works. It's definitely much less common than the recently-created version of theft whereby a device is falsely "sold" while still retaining control over it.

But sure, go ahead and design a different system where say the device's current key can be used to replace itself with a new key - the important part is that there are no permanent privileged keys that cannot be changed by the owner. But then you have to mandate that this procedure is carried out when a device is sold, otherwise it's not really a sale.

Such schemes seem likely to have pitfalls for losing or corrupting the key though, and I'm personally more comfortable with falling back on physical reality which we've learned how to deal with over thousands of years rather than ending up with perfectly good devices that cannot be used.