It almost assuredly was not escalated to global. I received the same canned answer from them earlier and asked to be put in contact with a person from the European company.

Their response was to send me here: https://www.haier-europe.com/en_GB/technical-assistance/contact-us/

If you poke around, you'll find that there is no effective way to contact anyone by email unless you've got a specific support question with a model number attached, so I sent an email directly to support.ecommerce@haier-europe.com

Will it matter for anything? Probably not. Will at least one guy have to read some stern words about an attack on open source development? Yep, and that's good enough for me I guess :P