According to the poster the components their brother designs are often more expensive then the standard ones. Precisely because it takes a higher tolerance to fail between a tight time window. So it is in fact the opposite of resources are finite. They are spending more to squeeze the consumer.
If someone is telling you something, which you have no way to verify, it's obscene to cherry pick a piece of information to believe, use that to make your point and then call out the other piece as an unverified claim because it would completely destroy the point.
The notion of a battery tied to a GPIO pin in an HVAC thermostat amounts to an extraordinary claim. Unless we're talking about a smoke detector or other safety-critical item that actually has an expiration date (in which case I'd think they would use a real chemical timer), there are no obvious explanations for the battery other than planned obsolescence.
