I have no comment on whether the refund "should" be allowed, but if you're looking for a non-staff comment on the existence of expiration dates...

Yes, the expiration dates have always been there and the format of them has not changed.

In the first year or two, the expiration dates were sometimes inaccurate with a non-negligible frequency. But recently (at least a full year), I haven't noticed such inaccuracies, so I don't think that point is very relevant to the conversation at hand.