I will think twice now before saying “why couldn’t they just use USB for this?”
I dunno, I think either you're doing a small run and you can just bake in a Teensy or whatever, or you're doing a big run and $6k is a drop in the bucket.
Many, many products start life on a shoestring and small batch production runs.
There are other products that intentionally serve small markets, like people with disabilities.
For these organizations, $6,000 is not a trivial amount of money.
What are they gonna do when they run out?
I dunno, I think either you're doing a small run and you can just bake in a Teensy or whatever, or you're doing a big run and $6k is a drop in the bucket.