Sort of, Helium no longer sells hardware and the community votes on third party manufacturers to be approved for authorization on the Helium network. This has helped distributed hardware delivery more than any single organization was prepared to do, with the semiconductor and supply chain issues.

There is definitely an opportunity to sell overpriced hardware into the community then.

There are some other antenna-blockchain systems out there that look more like "schemes to sell hardware", such as Match X. There is a big and burgeoning market for these "passive income" things, people install hardware to earn a cryptocurrency.

It is definitely worthwhile to sell the hardware if you can.