There have been plenty of cases like this over time too. Company makes controversial change. Company rolls it back after outrage. Company slowly shifts over time until they've restored what's essentially the original controversial change.
When a company tells you their intention by announcing a change, it's often a good idea to listen. Even if their PR department does some good cleanup work in the aftermath.
Yeah exactly. When a company announces some money making scheme and it gets backlash they don't think "oops that was a mistake we won't do that"; they think "oops that was a mistake - we'll have to do it in a way that gets less backlash".
Another recent example is GitHub charging for self-hosted CI. They backtracked, but they're still going to end up doing something. They kind of have to because of all the "get 10x cheaper actions runners by changing one line" people.
I had checked as soon as I found out about the news the other day and it was there. I just checked on wayback machine and you're right, it was removed for some time.
However, if they're willing to put back that claim immediately, I doubt that their intention was to drop the free plan anytime soon, but probably it was to incentivize people to use the paid plans. Enshittification must happen sooner or later afterall, but fortunately vaultwarden exists and the export feature is highly unlikely gonna be removed immediately as the free plan disappears, so people could just switch to a third-party or self-hosted backend as soon as that happens.
When a company tells you their intention by announcing a change, it's often a good idea to listen. Even if their PR department does some good cleanup work in the aftermath.