I'm not sure if they did, but I do have the same problem and suspect malicious intent by Epson.
I replaced a cartridge with a 3rd party cartridge, it worked for 3 days (= 2 pages tekst), and then, when I checked the ink levels, it suddenly showed that all 3rd party cartridges were almost empty, while they were all pretty new and hardly used...... weird.
Printing the test patern with the epson driver software it showed missing lines etc.... of all 3rd party ...while it used to work flawlessly before.
I also can't check the number of printed pages.
If Epson wants to convince users to use their own expesive ink-cartridges they could easily manipulate print results when they detect 3rd party cartridges.
My printer is the XP-960