Sadly, this is not the first time someone on HN ignorantly assumed solar panels come bundled with scary Chinese firmware in their comment.

It's a failure-mode only those not familiar with the basics of solar can come up with, but are readoning it out from "first principles".

It could happen I suppose, but most likely it would be an American company adding unnecessary spyware/rentware to a commodity product that didn't really need software in the first place and then lobbying to make the bare product illegal somehow.