This is quite old news to me. I got an email several months ago about these changes and they put them into place only a few weeks after that.
Regardless I still feel sad to see how shitty it is for new members to sign up. This definitely will not inflate the user count overall, it would rather deflate and leave the platform with a degrading traffic.
For creators it may result in less traffic too, because the fees are too high depending on where in the world you are. Leaving direct donations as the only cheap option for support.
I don't know, the membership is cool an all, but we can't even allow for 1 time donations on Patreon, which is sad in my opinion...
Personally, I will probably keep my Patreon, but still end up putting more focus onto Ko-Fi.