“they took a $1 key and turned it into a couple hundred dollar remote start key fob,”
The ‘feature’ was not a part of the quoted design. It was discovered by some user that a sequence of button presses would start the car.
What I am saying is that we had perfectly good working keys we could get for $1, but someone somewhere said “let’s do away with that ability and force everyone to buy less with chips in them that cost hundreds, and limit how many they can have and force the to replace the whole antilock device if they lose their allotted number of keys