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am I missing something huge here?
Yes, the email telling you that you need to contact the reseller you purchased it from.
That is not an uncommon practice for warranty on items purchased through reseller. Hopefully it was purchased from a reputable store and you can get them to honour the warranty.
That's not the norm in the computer industry at all though, is it?
Hardware manufacturers pretty much always offer support. You always (at least in most countries) have the option of leaning on the seller, but I genuinely can't say I've ever encountered a hardware manufacturer who doesn't offer support for their product regardless of where you bought it.
And since I would like to figure out the issue I'm having instead of just getting a replacement and creating some unnecessary waste from an otherwise perfectly functional keyboard, I feel like it's justified to be weirded out by them refusing to offer support for a product they've specifically made their profit on already.
I do agree its odd, but not all companies have transferable warranties if sold by a 3rd party vendor that does not sell a product officially. Some also require purchase receipt ontop of the SN.
Companies that do serial number only tend to have product support whenever because the warranty activated when the first official sale of the product happened.
Some outright reject if youre not the original owner (e.g for GPUs, plenty, Nvidia themselves, Sapphire, XFX, Zotac). Asus and Gigabyte off the top of my head requires original purchase receipt (so effectively non transferable unless you are the official original owner or the original official owner gave you a copy of its original receipt)