I think this was a comment on the fact that many stereo components were sold with remote receivers but no remotes.

I have memories a bunch of in the late 80s going to our electronics store so my brother could program our new programmable remote so we use it could use it with our cd player.. so sneaky we were.

This article is well more sophisticated.

Not crapping on this project because it's hella awesome, but a more scalable solution (which might not be worth it at all) would be to make a HTTP interface to a remote control, then have the remote control beam IR signals at whatever. This would mean that for any new device you add, you just have to pair the remote instead of wiring up another Pi to it.