Comment No, it's their "War on Free" (Score 1) 69
I had several dozen apps in the Play store. This is a lot like the Unity Engine debacle from a little while ago, Google realized free apps are cutting in on the market for paid apps, and has been adding more and more flaming hoops for developers to jump through to keep their apps in the app store. All of my apps are (were) free, no ads, no tracking, etc, I made not a dime from them. It finally got to the point where having apps in their store wasn't worth it. When you have 50 apps, and they give you a five minute task for each one, that's five hours of my time. The final straw for me was when they required everyone to update the compiledAppVersion (or whatever it was) parameter every two years, even if the app was supported on 99+% of all active devices. I had already decided to let all of my apps die at that point, I had a copy on my phone and that was good enough for me, and I figured Google was only going to turn up the heat from there. And they did, the final final straw was the "Data Privacy" section in the store listing, which is where the permissions an app requires *SHOULD* be listed, instead they want app developers to do a semi-free form explanation the data the app collects to give users less motivation to go to the actual Permissions section (which keeps getting more and more buried). None of my apps collected data, so there wasn't really anything to put there, and I couldn't ethically convince myself to play their game of hiding the actual permissions from users, so not updating that section was why most of my apps were pulled, even though they eventually would have been pulled for not updating the compiledAppVersion.
Their goal is quite clear, make maintaining apps painful enough that only people who get paid to keep them there will put up with all of their crap.