Sure, and they would have gotten precious little criticism if they had displayed a big warning message on detecting a questionable part. The problem was that they decided to unilaterally destroy customer property.

Much worse: FTDI's customers are the distributors, whose customers are (usually) board assembly houses, whose customers are electronics vendors, whose customers are electronics users. FTDI decided to unilaterally destroy the property of their customers' customers' customers' customers. Or, rather, the customers of people who thought they were FTDI's customers' customers' customers, but whose suppliers' suppliers were actually cheating them.

The miraculous thing is that FTDI escaped criminal prosecution for this.