I don't put this on Sony, they released it on Epic also (free right now) and think it's their arrempt to consolidate their players in the endgame modes. What comes next, if anything, from Godfall? Remains to be seen. Maybe they want to add things that would break the relatively shallow leveling grind that existed previously, or maybe they have a big expansion cooking and this maximizes their ROI with the entire player base at the same general place.
All the upgrade charges, trash, yeah. That's Sony milking the power of their library, and is unfortunate.