No worries mate, and I generally echo your sentiments.
Considering that the official link cable apparently can have the same issue as the 3rd party ones, logic would obviously then dictate that this problem is unintentional as currently no-one stands to gain. But who knows what's going on?!
Based on some very quick research, artificial inhibiting, or more specifically blocking a products operation, can be (shall we say) allowable, but only under very certain criteria, but does raise ethical questions regardless. It could be argued that a company has the right to only support 1st party accessories (especially if safety is in question) but there's a flip-side where that process could possibly be disallowed due to regional regulatory requirements upon market dominance & unfair restriction of competition.
Unless this type of matter has already been covered in some kind of black & white class action lawsuit, there's quite possibly / probably some grey to this matter. Yes we can clearly argue that we bought a product knowing that 3rd party accessories worked at the time of purchase, and in principle that's a tight argument, but unlike 1st party accessories which we can undoubtedly have a very significant amount of expectation of functionality, there's no guarantees placed on 3rd party accessories' functionality. That's also quite possibly why this matter hasn't been covered journalistically as it's a minefield of a story, and who wants to voluntarily jump into a minefield?
In this particular case, due to aforementioned potential ethical considerations, I would dare to presume that given the effective ultimatum, a sizeable percentage of Quest users would abandon Meta compared to ponying up for an unjustifiably expensive link cable, should that scenario (hypothetically or otherwise) happen. That's why I'm personally extending a very generous benefit of doubt in Meta's innocence because anything else could (and likely would) be very destructive for all parties.
That all said, yeah, I'm just as frustrated as you and many others here are, to the extent when I now look upon my Quest 3 with newfound negative association, which also plants the seed of uncertainty in my faith toward the products ongoing functionality and Meta as a whole for the foreseeable future.
For all our sakes, let's just hope they turn this around before any longer.
