Removal of any identifying marks seems to be common practice in China, to slow down products from being copied and reproduced at a lower cost by their grey markets. Even with genuine and resonably well made products. Aliexpress in rife with low quality variations and clones.
Sharing a story... many years ago, I had a side gig which consisted of making electronics for a certain niche market.
I didn't make a fortune, but it really helped me at the time.
It was before cheap PCB assembly at low volumes was available for cheap in the western world so I was building the electronics myself.
It was also before microcontrollers, secure boot and all that stuff, so designs were particularly vulnerable to copying.
And once that happens, unless you were a company with big pockets, it was very hard if not impossible to make it stop.
The build process did include a step of scratching the markings of a certain critical component...
Fast forward a few years, I end up on a forum where people describe my design, start to reverse engineer it and were stuck on the mystery IC.
Could they have redesigned the product ? Certainly. But higher effort.
Could they have found out what the chip was ? Certainly. But higher effort.
Would they have sold a copycat product if they found what it was ? Maybe not. But maybe yes...
In China, copying is rampant, it's not a secret. And many international buyers are totally ok buying copied products... so there is a market for it... in fact, many buyers don't even know who invented the product first.
So, I totally understand why some companies do it. Actively obfuscating company IP/secrets.
I am sure many of you working in the industry also know that component selection is a critical design input parameter especially for high volume, and/or cost-critical designs.
Another variation of the situation is when companies have an invention... but choose not to patent it. Because in some situations, publishing the secrets would make it trivial to copy them, and litigation would not necessarily be trivial or cheap. In some cases, if the inner working or details of the invention are not published, it is hard to copy. So it's also a form of passive obfuscation.
I don't blame Hantek for that. I think we should focus the blame on the buggy firmware and possibly flawed design leading to a variety of weird issues (see this thread, random DC offsets, huge noise on the waveform at certain sampling parameters but not others, ...)