That sounds right, and your experience obviously gives you a negative experience of the manufacturer. But as an engineer in this situation I can relate. If we had phone-home activation I'd probably try to argue that it should be expiring re-enabled every year in the product so that if we abandoned it then users wouldn't be stranded.

The question I'd have to answer is - would this be a net positive? Would it lead to more or less sales? Would we only lose customers who wouldn't buy a new license anyway? What would the cost be of my proposed feature that helps customers in the future?

In our situation there is zero risk of e.g. losing business to open source, so management would likely be deligthted with the idea that users would not be running our old software. In reality we avoid the problem entirely by just selling subscriptions like so many others these days. The software has a kill switch that makes it unusable after the planned release date of version N+2.