They’ve longed lobbied for anti-circumvention legislation and the corrupt politicians in the US and the rest of the World (with the EU Comission as a notable mention) have made sure it was implemented everywhere, exactly to avoid such a future.

The entire rotten edifice of Intellectual Property in the present day is literally the product of decades of corrupt politicians stealing more and more from the Public Domain to extend and protect this entirelly artificial kind of “property” for the benefit of the ultra-rich.

I was there in the 90s when this corrupt destruction of the “commons” started limiting what could be done in the Digital domain and saw how Techies lost, which is how we ended up with two decades of every more and ever more enshittified “closed garden” setups for all kinds of digital things.

Without shit like anti-circumvention legislation run of the mill people would have easy access in their friendly corner store to China-made devices doing things like what you describe or, for example, break out of Apple’s closed garden.