I doubt many are doing this upgrade, and I think its awesome someone has the tooling & skill to do so. I cannot fathom how this is a threat to RPI. I would assume a community firmware patch will likely release & resolve the limitation (until it becomes a signed binary)
It's already a signed binary, with rollback protection. (According to Reddit comments; I stopped using Raspis a long time ago)
> there may be a minor financial gain in buying a part with say a 2GB part, swapping it for an 8GB part of dubious origin, and reselling it as an 8GB device. However, this brings an element of risk to the user - the board hasn't been tested by us - and is a potential support burden for us, with customers complaining of unreliable devices. We therefore remove the commercial incentive by locking devices to their original RAM size.
Frankly, that sounds pretty reasonable to me
If they want to reduce the support burden they can use serial numbers to track what board has what ram - if they don’t match no support because it’s modified hardware.
Therefore I agree with manufacturer's decision.