>The only surprising thing here is they took an action to brick something instead of just abandoning it.

You're right, but I wouldn't say surprising. I do wonder what would happen if the units just stopped working outright one day and they're all intended to be gridded and nothing works properly anymore and the distributors are stumped and can't get ahold of anyone.

Fair point - it would be trivial frankly to embed a ‘bug’ which causes them to all brick at some arbitrary point in the future too. Considering the level the firmware works at, probably even catch on fire.