The article on HN only said that they seemed to be collecting this to detect resellers. How else did the behavior change?
Most services I know that are trying to block abuse do collect device info
regardless of anything else, whether what you said is true or not: blocking program execution based on the detected environment is a runtime behaviour change.
There is this whole thing where Fable silently starts behaving worse if they suspect you are trying to use it for RL or are otherwise building a competing product. This is likely the primary vector how that works: they check if you are in china, if you proxy your requests, and if you are from a list of known labs or match a couple keywords