I'd say that hardware manufacturers are not accustomed to software flexibility.

They may treat changing a timeout value like changing a capacitor with one of a different value on a PCB. Doing it is slow and expensive, involving suppliers, delays, testing campaigns, etc... So that's the kind of thing that is specified up front, to avoid having to touch anything in production. If a change is needed, it will go in V2, months later at best.

It has some advantages, such as not breaking things that work, but they are also not fixing things that don't.