I wonder why this is illegal but it's legal for hardware to deny service or even break stuff when they detect you're using something they don't like (I'm referring to printers, but I also remember a case where a microcontroller would try to brick something when it detected a counterfeit cable).
You might be thinking of the big FTDI scandal where they published a driver update for their chips that would attempt to detect a counterfeit FTDI chip and if it found one it would reconfigure the counterfeit chip with a bogus VID and PID thus rendering it essentially bricked. Bricking the cables using counterfeit chips wasn't the worst of it though, some of the chips in question were integrated into expensive equipment and rather than the manufacturer trying to use counterfeit FTDI chips they very well might be the victim being unwittingly sold counterfeits while paying the fraudster full price.
Probably the timed aspect of it is the issue. Selling something that purposefully breaks in that way is malicious. Unless he comes up with a truly fantastic excuse but it doesn't sound like he did.
Overflow of like milliseconds counter would be just the thing. After all a lot of software did this trick with the 2 digit year counter in the 20th century guaranteeing that massive upgrade and contractor y2k call. And the UNIX 32 bit seconds counter comes to mind too - the guys i guess were planning long-term for a very plush retirement.
It was not that uncommon if you bought a cheap USB to serial or USB to TTL dongle online.
APC devices are generally pretty good, except for this infuriating and dangerous “feature”.
It’s almost 2020, and vendors still have this ridiculous idea that they can lock you into their proprietary ecosystem by doing stuff like this.
That said, there's absolutely zero reason to keep maintaining this ancient and dangerous option.