The functionality is, in fact, still there, and basically every phone with a headphone jack turns it on.

Old SoC may have had this functionality

Modern SoCs still have it...

Further we've moved to Software Defined Radios in general... So it's all programmable.

Hence the quotations around "free". Qualcomm isn'tgoing to tape out a custom chip without it for you just because you don't want that block.

that has since been reclaimed by other function more useful to most users.

This was my uncertainty, do you know for certain that they don't include FM functionality on their chips anymore or are you just guessing? The public facing documentation is not exactly detailed enough to tell for sure.

No, but it's so immaterial it hasn't really been worth the effort to exclude it yet