Possibly, but we're talking about appliances here. I know for a fact that my HVAC controller polls their cloud service just as much as my HA does (using a similarly-developed plugin to what we're talking about here).

Of course, that could mean it's doubling the number of times they're being hit, but I somehow doubt there's millions of customers doing that - the forks and stars on the repos are only in the hundreds.

I'm guessing it's what others here have already said - loss of usage data that they've been able to sell.