It's definitely possible to recal or replace the hardware, it's just way easier to recal that replace hardware.

One example I can think of is one project whose calibration and braking performance meant it was just eking out a pass, but because of the transition to copper-free brake pads, was now hitting the target. It wasn't a huge deal, and we had to recalibrate it to brake a bit earlier.

VW (and Mercedes) is a pretty special case in terms of their industry pull. When I worked at a German Tier 1, it was very much a case of if they say "jump" you asked, "how high?". They have such a massive output of vehicles, as a supplier, you'll do anything possible to try and maintain their business. Even being on the team for NA/LATAM customers, we'd be told to sideline what we were working on to support stuff for VW/Mercedes, even though we saw literally no benefit from it as the NA team, and it could seriously hurt some of the projects we were working on. However, the reality was that the business from VW alone was larger than basically every other project we had combined, so it was worth it to piss off our other customers to keep them happy.

I also welcome standard AEB, but I'm not convinced customers are going to like it to be entirely honest. With how the regulation is written, it's asking a lot from OEMs in terms of performance, and with perfect performance being required to even just sell a vehicle, I fear that we're going to wind up with ultra-sensitive systems with heaps of false-positive/"phantom braking" reactions, just to ensure they pass the regs. NHTSA in all their infinite wisdom did include some very basic FP testing, but not an acceptable rate of FP per X number of miles. Also, because of the extremely high nighttime requirements, expect headlights to get even more blinding in the coming years...