to me, this is the most logical conclusion of their actions to date. If I consider the possibility of e.g. a Google acquisition, their actions makes sense.
from these forums alone, they've clearly alienated long term highest-revenue users. their silence makes it clear they don't care, indicating these users are not important to their go forward strategy
their data is in google cloud. they attempted to evolve their TOS in 2016 in a way that would allow them to mine our data without having opted in. shedding premium users would actually reduce that objection and make such a change easier.
they've long resisted encrypting Anything.
AND they've removed support for local notebooks.
to me, this suggests there has to be a bigger monetization play in the works. and to me, the most logical assets are eyeballs (revenue or not) and data (ads)
I've been meaning to pull my more sensitive notebooks out of Evernote for a while, and this whole process has given me urgency. I'm still using Legacy for the time being, but I'm watching these conversations closely.