What I'm saying is that just "don't write code to try to detect clones, and treat every chip the same as you're currently treating official ones" would have been sufficient to make it work, and they intentionally did extra work and wrote extra code to make it not work on clones.
Again, you do not actually know that. If you read what I wrote earlier, then you would understand that there are plausible scenarios where no intentional breakage occurred.
I don't know for sure that it was intentional, but you also don't know for sure that it wasn't. And the existence of the string is quite strong evidence in favor of it being intentional.