I had no interest in arguing the point, although I did try to introduce some common sense into the system, with poor results. Pretend you're doing computah repair for a client that demands exact replacement parts. Their logic is that they have some number of identical wafer fab facilities scattered around the world. They want their process to be identical, no matter where the chips are made. In the mid 1970's, I experienced what happens when such controls as Copy Exact are not in place. I had to deal with IF IC's (ULN2136) that delivered radically different gains from the same manufacturer, depending on where they were made. It was not a pleasant experience. To a chip maker, the cost of a PC is hardly noticeable when compared to other expenses. However, if the PC hiccups, and the line goes down, the losses are huge. Nobody wants to take the risk.
As it happened, someone before my time did try to upgrade the PC's. They went from a 386SX20 motherboard, to a 486DX2/66 motherboard. There were also changes to the OS, IO boards, etc. The software vendor obligingly did all the testing and provided the required copy protection dongles. It should have worked, but didn't. I never found out exactly what went wrong mostly because the person in charge of the upgrade was no longer with the company. My best guess was fixed timing loops in the custom software that broke when run on a faster machine. I've seen the same thing happen when replacing motherboards on CNC machines and with Motorola radio programming software[1].
At one point, someone asked if I wanted to repeat the failed PC upgrade exercise, or just continue the Copy Exact (or whatever it was called at the time) system. I did a quick mental time schedule and risk analysis for both options, and decided that Copy Exact was easier and offered less risk, but eventually a new machine and new software would be required. Someone was assigned to deal with the software vendor which then became outside my area of involvement.
[1] DOXBox deals with timing differences by adjusting the clock speed using settings, command line options, and function keys (ctrl-F11, ctrl-F12): While intended primarily for running old games on modern hardware, it's also useful for running old DOS programs with fixed timing loops on modern hardware.