I wonder if that concept gives them more supply-chain flexibility. If they just have a bunch of 8051 devices sitting around, they can program them to taste at

I wonder if that concept gives them more supply-chain flexibility. If they just have a bunch of 8051 devices sitting around, they can program them to taste at the last minute. I've done some work on a CH375/6 based project, and it's sort of limited-- the fact you can only burst 64 bytes at a time is likely a factor of it being based on such a small MCU, but OTOH, you can always get them at pretty modest prices, while plenty of other parts seem to have gone up or outright unavailable. When I went to get some USB-serialish adaptors, I went specifically for CH340 ones because I know they're explictly NOT a FTDI clone, so there's no risk of malicious drivers bricking them.