Intel wanted to do this with floating point operations on the Pentium, in the 1990s. A set of e-fuses would give you access to (say) another hundred million floating point adds or something, then the CPU would burn a fuse and you'd have to buy more (a final fuse would do a complete unlock).
Yes, it's a horrible idea.
Cashing in on Excel users is what Intel marketing was betting on. Only it wasn't just Excel users using the FPU: One of the things that killed this plan was the upswing in 3-D games that used floating point math (in other words, Quake).
And oscilloscope manufacturers. You can typically "unlock" more bandwidth with a code after purchasing. The delivered device is capable of sampling at greater bandwidth but the software prevents it above the paid-for bandwidth. I think Keysight are probably the worst offenders but I think many of them do it now. FOSS firmware for modern scopes seems a pipe dream given many now use custom FPGAs.
