Let's take this from another point of view:

You purchase a device or some piece of hardware for a project which becomes useful to others and you decide to make the project marketable and release your own line. You source your components and one of them happens to have an FTDI chip that you believe legitimately came from the company. Your project is accepted by others and everyone is happy.

Then one day, your supplier decides to switch out a source for the chip in one of the components of your project to one that's cheaper (the supplier may not suspect these are counterfeit). You don't see any difference either as you haven't tested it with the latest driver, which may not be out yet. The project is now shipped.

A new driver is released. An overwhelming number of customers now hit your support system saying the update has stopped your project cold. Rolling back the update has no effect. You don't know which component caused the problem as your project uses several from different suppliers. It may take days or even weeks to track down the problem, but meanwhile, your customers grow angry.

This is now your fault and you're left holding the bag.

This scenario need not be hypothetical, as this is just the same as GM "fixing" a problem with their ignition switch that has already claimed lives, but leaving the part number the same. This makes recalling a nightmare as there's now no way to tell which cars are affected until the switch fails or someone dies again.

Just the same as there's no way to tell which one of your project's components carry counterfeit chips and you need to issue a recall for potentially 100K units since you don't know which ones carry a counterfeit and there's no software fix anymore as the chip is bricked. Your project is also potentially being used in mission critical infrastructure that cannot be shut down to do a test without costing a lot of money. Better hope no one follows "best practices" and updates the driver as it may also contain a security fix.

FTDI is well within their rights to protect their product. But are they doing the ethical thing by costing unsuspecting customers and potentially hundreds of other businesses that rely on their product valuable time and money? All for not knowing that somewhere along the supply chain, someone cut a few corners and got their chips from a counterfeiter? Should they be victims twice; once by the counterfeiter and again by the company?

Yes, I take this answer at face value. I didn't really think there were only two possibilities here. Perhaps I was a bit blunt in the hopes of eliciting a "real" answer like this one.