Because they sell boxes with not correct working LAN chip and get only 100MBit. So they saved again money to not solder the LAN chip at all anymore.
And modified the kernel to work for both revisions.
We had some experience in past with such vendor by swapping any parts on the board what did cause stop booting again.
The support by CE will be dropped in future release for this device.
The new hardware shipped is locked anyway and not able to boot third party systems.