might apply to VW etc. Tesla can and has shown it can change any month, any quarter, or any year.
Your statement makes me believe you don't have experience in a manufacturing/assembly facility, or worked in supply chain or a purchasing department before.
The only reason Tesla has the appearance of making changes on the fly, is because they don't wait for model year to release some changes like every other car maker does. But don't mistake that for them somehow having a different ability to get new parts faster.
In many cases within their supply chain, they're getting parts from the same suppliers all the other car makers are getting theirs.
So any change to physical parts (excludes software obviously), must still go through the entire supply chain process, which does not happen overnight. I'm sure Tesla has streamlined everywhere they can, but limitations will always be present.
Tesla plans each change just like every other car maker, which can take months to be ready to implement. The only difference is that Tesla doesn't have to wait once they're ready. They just do it whenever.
All other car makers (exception to safety related changes) wait for their next model year to implement their changes.
In the case of the yolk/wheel, they weren't changing every model to the yolk, so because they had plenty of supply of steering wheels, they could quickly add those as optional to the MS. Then later made the wheel standard and the yolk optional since they already had supply chain commitments for yolk production.
But removing the stalks is a FAR bigger change at every level!
They cut off the supplier of the stalks, they changed the steering column cover to remove the cutouts for the stalks, and they ordered new steering wheels with the new buttons for signals, and new physical gear buttons above the rearview mirror, plus the investment of writing new software to move the gear shifting to the screen, etc...
All those changes took months of planning, then months to ramp up production from suppliers, etc... None of that happens quickly.
And if you look back at major refreshes of models, they still do hold back several bigger changes to have more differences in the refreshes.
Tesla really isn't that much different from any other company, from a production standpoint. Yeah, they'll make minor changes any time, but other companies might even do that without announcing it if it's a small enough change.