I remember when I started as a software engineer in the 80s, someone told me about "cripple boards" in mainframe computers.

Owners could pay a small fortune to have their computer "upgraded" to run at a faster speed. The manufacter's engineer would turn up and surreptitiously remove a circuit board that was designed to force the computer to run slow. So the computer would then run at the faster speed that it had always been capable of.

Not 100% sure if it was true, but certainly the idea of anti-features has been around for a long time.