Or maybe that's simply their public-facing reason.

Too expensive to implement (in developer salary), and AI can't code it in five minutes and ship it yesterday?

They are a small company, yeah, but that also means they are extremely agile, and this feels like the kind of a feature that would take me (a single developer) maybe a couple days to implement.

I mean, if spending 16 hours to implement a future proofing feature is not acceptable, I don't know what is.