This change, is absolutely benign for the vast majority. Which means it’s a desperate grab to make more money which will ultimately fail.

Check out the trend over time.

They removed plugins when it was a threat to them controlling their ecosystem, people were using them to pull from YouTube and anime sources directly. They were basically turning them into Kodi, but with benefits

They did the same thing with offline resharing. You used to be able to sync a bunch of crap to your phone, go on vacation and share it with your family from your phone.

Then they started obnoxiously tracking you under the guise that you could see what your friends were watching, but they changed their terms so they could sell your watch data to third parties.

Then they started putting ads into free remote watch

Now there’s no more free remote watch.

As you said, this change is unlikely to make a big difference for anybody, so it’s unlikely for them to make any serious money from it.

My personal guess is, they’re sitting on a fuck ton of venture capital promises and those bills are coming due with the market becoming questionable.

They’ve done everything to the free crowd to increase revenue. If they are truly cash strapped, the next logical thing is to get all these people with lifetime passes to buy in again but on a subscription basis. That means they’re either going to abandon the lifetime product like playon did, or find some other way to force everyone to pay monthly to watch their own content.

Nobody seen anybody needs to switch to jellyfin but you’re going to need a backup plan because inside of the next year or two chances are Plex is not going to be recognizable to you.