- 8GB Pi is out of stock / too expensive - due to RAM shortage

- Someone bought a load of non-8GB Pis

- Replaced the RAM with whatever they could get their hands on (cheap enough to be worth the hassle, cheap because no one else wants it even given the ongoing shortage - so probably pretty suspicious / of dubious quality)

- The end user buys it and has no idea it has been modified and the warranty is void

- RPi probably don't want to spend their time supporting it. Probably can't if the memory is a load of crap, even if they wanted to. It gets bricked.

The point here is someone bought something else (a fake pi) than they thought they were getting. Not that someone willingly wanted to go hacking.

in those jurisdictions where either price discrimination or locking hardware are not illegal, it is typically perfectly legal to reverse engineer for compatibility purposes. So nothing prevents such resellers from upping their game and learning a thing or two about link training and general SDRAM bringup.

Once they have the knowledge legally required in such jurisdictions the product just flows in the other jurisdictions anyway.

Courts upheld the monopolistic position of microsoft etc. for decades, but respect has no finality, "re" + "spect" to review, so later such companies were fined for their decades long transgressions.

But during those decades it may appear legal to the average consumer.

Inaction is not permission.