Not a pessimist, a realist. They wouldn't drum up such negativity unless they were planning on following through. That would be silly.
And it is far from understandable, not only will they be the only entity out there using KYC while trying to pass on that cost to its usere-base; but they are doing so completely unnecessarily. They aren't legally required to do so, and their excuse of doing it because they aren't talented enough to code anti-bot measures either highlights their incompetence, or the fact that they are lying. I certainly don't think that they are incompetent, but the lying makes a whole lot of sense.
The simple reality is that with 8 million users, a dollar for each of them is huge money. They have spent considerable amount of time and effort trying to fool the user base that the completely untradable Pi they have is worth something, so we will think that throwing away that dollar for the sake of our supposedly much more valuable Pi is a no brainer. But the reality is that is the furthest thing from the truth. Our Pi is worth exactly zero dollars, making the dollar a much higher price to pay.