Are any of those examples of removing a feature from a hardware device, which to me seemed to be the point of the parent. They're comparing car entertainment/GPS systems with phones.

Maybe 12 years ago, I had a device with sideloading that allowed me to run Plex (genuinely used for photo viewing). NowTV removed side-loading via a forced update and thus removed the principle reason I bought that device rather than another. Bought a FireTV stick after that and downloaded Plex from their appstore.