That is right, but one thing is not like the other. You have always been free to set expiry low on your own certificates, but that is not the same as enforcing it on everyones ceritificate.
> Questions come up: do you block a request if you fail to download the latest CRL? How often do you refresh it?
In the before times we left settings like this up to competent system administrators to decide based on risk and not hardcoded by a handful of people at Google.
Stale news. Mozilla introduced a new solution for certificate revocation that solves nearly all the problems with old methods. While it hasn't really taken off outside of Firefox, that's mostly because Google and Apple haven't embraced it because they are too busy trying to shorten certificate life unnecessarily.
If anyone is renewing certificates with less than a day remaining, that's an issue on their end far more than anything else.