I can see why Prusa is annoyed that people clone his designs and then sell them for cheaper. The end result is not truly the value that his company provides; it's all the careful tweaking of the firmware to make it work perfectly every time that probably accounts for 80% of their engineering cost, and it hurts when someone takes that from you. (Compare the out of the box experience between an i3 and an Ender 3, for example. Absolutely nothing stopping Creality from making it perfect like Prusa, but I bet most Ender 3 users don't get a decent print until they self-tweak settings that should be correct from the factory.)

Having said that, I think what hurts Prusa the most is their inability to keep up with demand from the US. The cheap clones win because they're still cheaper after Amazon same-day delivery. With Prusa, ordering a 3D printer is a "if you're really lucky, you might have one in a couple months" situation. This is costing them way more revenue than people cloning their motherboards. If they could sell to the US market efficiently, they would be making so much money they probably wouldn't even realize a couple of Aliexpress stores were selling outright clones.

(I indeed started my 3D printing adventure with a cheap printer that shipped to me overnight. And regretted every moment with that god awful piece of shit. At that point, I knew it was time to get something good, and it was well worth the 3 or 4 months I waited for an i3. But, most people give up much sooner than me.

I'm also going to insert a random story here; I ended up rebuilding that printer with my own design for most of the parts, saving only the enclosure and motion system. After probably 60 hours spent on that project, it still prints terribly because the design of the bed is intrinsically flawed. The original manufacturer works around that by having you manually level the bed at 20 mesh points, and then printing a 30 gram raft over the course of an hour to give your actual print a level bed. It is just terrible, and that's why I like Prusa. It doesn't do that.)

To me, Prusa has 3 selling points; they test their stuff before shipping it, the printers manufacture themselves (which gives you a feeling that they are accurate and reliable over time), and the entire stack is open source. If they remove one of those value props, I don't know if they're Prusa Research anymore. They're just one more anonymous manufacturer in a race to the bottom.