I'd say that's a spurious correlation, if it exists at all. Just look at all the Android phone makers who don't allow bootloader unlocks and those who do. Personally I'd say Google Pixel or Sony Xperia phones last longer than Huawei ones, though I wouldn't dare say reprogrammability has anything to do with it.

Besides, when the options on the market range from "impossible" to "damn hard to reprogram", can you blame the market for not taking advantage of that? I'm certain a law that would allow waste recycling companies to unlock any phone, even without password or receipt, would lead to phones or phone motherboards being reused in a variety of lower-volume products.

I wanted to add a correction, I think that the user should be able to give up this right if it helps prevent theft for example. Today, if forums can be trusted, many Android phones protected with Google Account (FRP - Factory Reset Protection) can be unlocked in different ways, sometimes as easy as opening a keyboard (or invoking a voice input), going to settings and disabling the protection, or deleting a partition with FRP data. And for other phones there are no publicly available information, but there is software that you can rent. So (if the information on the forums is true) it seems that Google's anti-theft protection was made just for a bullet point in marketing materials and not for really preventing theft.