You can run a service on the same port with less processing overhead than a reverse proxy. Additionally it provides you some benefit in domain separation. For $25 I’d pick up one or two, couldn’t hurt to have in the pocket and there are only so many of them afterall.

The explanation is guys in marketing buying fancy lunches and rounds of golf for the guys in C-Suite (Source: A tired IT admin that has had to talk his management team off of this cliff due to fancy tech demo dinners from unsolicited cloud/software companies)

Let us not forget that there is not a single employer on the planet who would willingly hire and pay someone more for their time than that person’s time is worth. Each employee of a company is making that company money. They deserve comfort because they are the company.

It’s likely done in an automated way by the same equipment that tests the hardware, so costs are probably more along the lines of a few fractions of a penny, and imo shipping any device without an os at all is a bit silly as they could very likely end up in the hands of someone without the capability or equipment to image them.