That should indeed be possible. And ideally it'd be illegal for the manufacturer to try to stop you.

I've thought about this a bit, and I feel like many of these sort of abuses could be mitigated rather elegantly with some sort of right-to-repair type legislation focused on providing consumers with the ability to modify their property as they see fit. Far less costly than trying to anticipate and ban every possible anti-feature manufacturers could build into their products.