I think you are right that optimising engineering cost is the goal of these practices, but I believe it is a bad thing.
In the end the only people that benefit from this are the owners of the product [...]
Yes, that's exactly how the for-profit software industry (and really any for-profit industry) is run. The owners maximize their benefit. If you want to change that, that's a much different problem on a much larger scale, but you will not see a for-profit company do anything but that.