> Presumably, the makers thought that making the card look like a smart card would help people understand it. The card actually uses an entirely different technology.

It’s kind of the same, though. The physical communication layer is different, but the higher protocol layers are basically identical. Smart cards with contacts follow ISO 7816. These MIFARE contactless cards are ISO 14443 Type A cards, and their protocol follows ISO 7816-4.

This shouldn’t be terribly surprising — the entire ecosystem built for smart cards with contacts wants to support contactless cards with minimal changes, and this includes the host software, the readers, and the logic in the cards. There are even plenty of devices where the same device supports contact and contactless uses — plenty of credit cards, bank cards, and FIDO devices are like this.

This is analogous to WiFi and wired Ethernet. They’re have very different physical layers, but they are logically compatible, and the same software supports both.