This post was written in late January. Bluesky opened up early access to federation about a month later, which does change some of the perspective. https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation
"This is just for a brief period during polishing/debugging since this is the first time third-party PDS hosts have been added to the network.
The goal is just to help PDS operators join the network and make sure that if there's a problem we have a channel of communication open."