I’ve asked someone work inside and he said the suppliers of the readers won’t upgrade them. Not sure what the deal is.
Though, I still have ~$8 Clipper credit on my phone that I may or may not ever use...
They also support Apple’s Transit card (Clipper card in your Apple Wallet) so it works by tapping your phone, without unlocking it. It should also work with your iPhone turned off (newer models I think iPhone 14+ only)
At that point you might as well fuse those features into one companion computer and let it handle NFC payments under certain conditions, so people can take a safe ride home with a dead phone.
It's not worth the money to the suppliers to go through the trouble of managing the upgrade of that one system alone; likely there's an opportunity cost where they have limited resources and they want to focus on the bigger projects making bigger impacts and bigger sales.
The last building I lived in, the sliding balcony doors were all starting to wear out. Building management called the company that made the doors to ask them about repairs or replacement and were told that the cost of replacing the doors for people isn't worth their time; basically, why would they come fix our old balcony doors for $x when they could spend their time on building and installing new balcony doors on a new build for $xx?