That's actually a super common way to handle licensing in hard IP. You don't want to spin different revisions of a chip with and without the IP, that's expensive. So you build in fuses to permanently disable the IP. This happens a lot with hardware video encoder/decoder blocks.
Or you do it the other way around in software - remember the Pi 1/2 era where you had to buy separate licenses for MPEG/h264 HW decoders, tied to the Pi's serial number?
