I get no longer supporting products, but bricking them?

I think what’s happening in the background here is these “Internet of Trash” devices hook to cloud infrastructure for which the business no longer wants to pay.

If they were interested in actually building something useful, they would open up their API layers and add a way to link them to different services. But since they don’t give a fuck about you as a customer, and they plan poorly as a business, instead they code everything so that it is hopelessly coupled (probably through hard-coded things up to and including certificates) with specific garbage they made, and impossible to move to anything else, and then they brick your shit.