Would you buy a remote that you know can cease to function at a whim of the producer, despite being fully operational from electronics' standpoint?

Not really, but I'll buy hardware with a guaranteed service length. For example, the service is guaranteed for 7 years after activation.

Might as well make it 20 years. For something like a remote control you can fit 100k users on a server, and a little bit of money per device can go an extremely long way. Extra large ec2 servers (which you can easily do better than on cost) are about a thousand dollars a year, and you only need a few hours of sysadmin work per month across the entire fleet.

And you can cut servers as people end up using devices less on their own.

Having a physical remote isn't the value proposition. Being able to remotely control a wide variety of aspects of my home is the service I would pay for. The hardware that accomplishes that is irrelevant.

Not when the ir database can be loaded into a device and purchased once.