I notice Microchip has a line of single wire EEPROMs, and they’re WAY cheaper than anything equivalent in 1Wire (which I considered abandoned way back in 2008).
On github I get 3 hits, so it doesn’t seem to be super popular. However it has some snap in form factor used to lock cables, printer carts, and other stuff to a specific manufacturer, so that might be worth a look.
The protocol seems to be Manchester encoded I2C. That’s an over simplification, but it’s what I got after skimming the data sheet. Should be easy to do in PIo, but we could start with one of the software libraries available to get a feel for everything.