They probably wanted to sell AirTags for remotes then people were like “nah”. 😂Well, it's a beta so that's not unexpected.
What is unexpected is that in finished versions of iOS we have somehow not seen integration of this hardware feature. People were rightly kvetching about the lack of Find My support when the Siri remote first came out, so it's just plain weird they didn't address it with an iOS update a couple years ago. It's a marketable feature so they've definitely left money on the table by not selling against it. I guess when you're as big as Apple you can do dumb things like that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Similar weirdness to how the HomePod Mini had temperature and humidity sensors installed day 1, but only recently has there been software support exposing them to the user.