Anecdotically, 64GB works extremely reliably on 8GB cards after unlock.

It is much more of "let's sell cards to crypto people, but nerf them, to not harm our enterprise margins", not "we've got a ton of subpar hardware, let's to something with it".

crypto was a real boom... I could imagine these cards were already in production when the crypto guys came along willing to give lots of $$$ for them, but wanting really short lead times...