I kind of doubt that adding an extra chip was the only way to preserve the ability to boot from microSD, given earlier hardware revisions did do it too - i.e. its something they decided to take away. (RPi btw nowadays can boot from multiple sources too ;))

And even then, it's only one of the complaints, and this isn't the only places I see backlash against pines treatment of the dev community - again for a company that relies on said community for a lot of software work across their products. My impression is that RPi foundation with Raspian relied a lot less on the community.