I would feed them and they’d fall asleep in my arms but sometimes I would be terrified to move them in case they woke (and sometimes I’d just enjoy cuddling them as they slept). However the TV remote might have been too far to reach, whereas my phone was always in my pocket.
BT became useful again when they became older and started playing with the TV remote. It was always getting lost. Whereas my phone wasn’t.
But in terms of involving installing an app on your phone to emulate a remote, both are the same so it's no different. At least it's for more than just to configure it, mandating a connection to a phone you may or may not have seems like a stretch. At least by making it possible to use your BT for a remote you're expanding the features rather than breaking them.
Why would you do this? Initial configuration but then never again? I can't think of a technical reason it meaningfully helps when you can already type in a wifi password with the remote, so I'm inclined to assume that the feature isn't for the customer but rather because they want you to use their app on your phone because the data on your phone is more valuable than the data on your TV.