Most modern chips nowadays such as the esp32 variants have their own flash encryption on the chip so it's not just as easy as knowing what kind of chip it is and trying to dump the code from it. If these devs are smart (which I would think that are) probably utilized this to prevent cloning. You can read here if you don't know about this.I agree it seems like a very silly step to stop at. Especially since they can’t even meet production demand anyway so what was the big rush
That being said they are already getting hella lazy with scratching off the SoCs so hopefully we get a better Chinese version sometime soon. I can’t imagine it would take long
Mod added proper link:
https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/stable/esp32/security/flash-encryption.html
Lot's of companies that use these chips use this feature to prevent people just cloning their devices and selling as their own.