[Karliss]

With the right techniques it's often possible to remove those annoying stickers without ripping them. Some of the techniques involve using a solvent or very thin and slippery blade. They are supposed to be resistant against that, but in practice a lot of time not enough.

NFC tag usually consists of two parts very tiny IC (small piece of silicon the size of sand grain) and antenna (a piece of metal foil in a fancy shape). You could make an NFC tag where attempting to remove it rips antenna, but that wouldn't destroy the IC. It's probably a matter of product price and quantities whether, counterfeiting it by reattaching the NFC chip to a new antenna is economically viable. As the process is not only possible it's performed at the NFC tag factory at very large quantities at very low cost. It might also be possible to repair parts of broken antenna assuming area around IC is undamaged.

So overall you get simplicity and cost of regular tamper resistance stickers, with better resistance against solvent and blade attacks, and security properties closer to what you get from secure NFC chip (except you can't perform more complicated cryptographic operations like signing arbitrary data).

> Is it just that technology is not good enough to manipulate such small pieces of metal? How long will this limitation persist?

I would expect that at any point in future, whatever the best controlled manufacturing technique invented are, it will be possible to create uncontrolled pattern at finer scale, or at least much cheaper. Unless we reach the point where maintaining stable state without deteriorating becomes a problem, or the quantity of data for storing and processing becomes impractical.