If they can sell another 16 cores at no incremental cost post sale, that's attractive. As long as it doesn't prevent that customer from buying a whole new 48 core chip from them, anyway.
The only reason why we tolerate such clear signs of market failure is because in the larger picture, Intel et al. need to keep their margins high and consistent to keep Moore's Law alive(ish). Maintaining such a fast pace of progress is probably better for customers in the long run, even if it means getting ripped off in the short term. But without such a benefit to make the tradeoff worthwhile, customers and economic policymakers would be right to be incensed when Intel uses wasteful tactics like disabling defect-free silicon in order to insulate their price sheet from the true supply and demand dynamics of their market.
Let's not forget our history here. I'm not a big fan of Intel but any techie will remember we successfully "tolerated" such practices decades ago when the Celeron 300A ran at double frequency, the Radeon X800 series got 50-100% more pixel shaders, or the Phenom X3s got 33% more cores for free. If anything customers were rejoicing.
The market was always artificially segmented. The only reason we don't know today whether disabled blocks are good or not is that manufacturers have gotten better at keeping them disabled.
You'd be hard pressed to tell me the actual real life difference for you between a $300 4-core CPU with 2 cores fused off, and a $300 4-core CPU with 2 cores licensed off.
> Intel uses wasteful tactics
Intel fashion dictates the user will see little benefit but differentiating SKUs in software is certainly less wasteful from the manufacturer's and OEM's perspective. The logistics alone might be worth it.
Software manufacturers ship full installers with features disabled in licensing. Streaming services store all content but serve you a lower quality one based on your particular "license". Car manufacturers sell essentially the same engine with different power outputs.
As I said, there are no bad products, just bad prices.
The fact that artificially crippling chips is not new does not mean it's a good thing. Having accepted a tradeoff doesn't erase its downsides.
Why?
If their yield improves, should lower core count chips become scarce and then approach the cost per core of higher end chips? That's not exactly in the interest of a consumer anyway.
Also, they absolutely already do that today - all chip manufacturers make viable cores inaccessible so they can have the right part mix that is selling the way they want.
If your demand curve perfectly matches your supply/yield curve, great - but that's rare over time.
As yields improve, consumers should expect to see changes other than dwindling stocks of low core count parts. High core count parts should be getting cheaper, or low core count parts start showing up with higher speed bins or lower voltage bins.