Per the CEO in today's meeting:

"This is a ploy to gather more people to use Level Play [advertising network]. The mediation provider [advertising network] makes a cut off every ad, and right now a lot of people are on AppLovin Max [not Unity's], so a big part of this is they want people to switch to Level Play, and by doing that they'll make way more than the install pricing they're suggesting. It's too early to panic, but it is a big change"

If that sounds like a ramble, it's because it was, but the tl;dr is it seems Unity is giving a secret pass to companies that switch to use Unity's advertising solution.

Also some quick fun facts:

• Unity was never profitable
• Unity gave up competing with Unreal over a year ago
• Godot is a free and open source engine that competes with Unity professionally
• The trash App Store/Play Store games spy on you extensively, although Apple and Google have significantly limited their spying ability over the last couple years (i.e we used to open your camera in the background, can't do that anymore)

Update:

CEO is in talks with some Unity folks. The impression is "this decision came from very high up in Unity" from an exec who "had no idea how bad of an idea it was". We're expecting a public revision shortly (next couple days)