A friend of mine worked at a cell phone repair shop and it was fairly common for someone to bring in their bulky keyboard-slideout HTC PDA that had frozen and typically the only recourse was a "hard reset" - reverting the phone to factory settings and removing all stored data (which was in the MB those days). Of course WinMo on most PDAs of the time was quite capable of keeling over all by itself without the aid of third-party programs, so the user couldn't always be blamed.
That woul be the end of the world, you could not push downgrades, like Samsung remotely disabling bootloader unlock or Bamboolab forcing all your 3D models through their cloud service.
The horror! They could even remove all your unskippable adds and disable all the spying, gross!