You said it's because they don't care about the bigger picture. But the bigger picture is they are doing everything to cut cost and adding extra chips is not worth it. They aren't exactly hailed for their built quality.
I highly doubt this was done for cost reasons, even including the additional assembly costs, which for surface mount resistors would be very low. This feels like a design error, and I doubt the support emails went anywhere meaningful.
[0]: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/chip-resistor-sur...
I imagine they got the cheapest engineer to make a functioning product. Changing their whole production line for a $0.001 component is hardly worth their time in this product segment, however debatable the ethics or PR of it is.
I agree that doing even a small redesign of something existing isn't free, but every company comes out with new designs for new products or to make an existing product more cheaply. At the very least they could acknowledge the issue and put the fix on the queue for the next rev of the board.
My guess is that the support person didn't actually forward anything on to any engineering team. At most they sent it to their supervisor, who told them to just make OP go away.
There is no such thing as "changing the whole production line".
Also, the marginal value the additional components provide exceed their costs by such a wide margin. The ROI is easily in the 10000%.