I highly doubt they used those cables maliciously knowing they’d go out right when the warranty expired. It was probably a cost thing, and they later realized (too late to fix it) during production sometime that the cables were a warranty issue.

Engineers don’t do thing maliciously with their designs. They pick things based on cost, and probably even raised the cable length as a risk/concern during the design and testing phase, and were overruled by the bean counters.

It’s happened to me before.