Maybe it's good news? To me it sounds as illegal as a car manufacturer requiring you to use Shell vpower in order for you to not void the warranty, and doing so after you bought the car.
Maybe the EU could then deal with this and ask the important question: Are they even allowed to link the functionality of IoT devices to an online account?
My reason for buying all Phillips was that their system was relatively open, that the gateway could be accessed and controlled via HTTP and put behind a firewall without access to and from the internet. And the ability to use 3rd party apps.
I've moved over to using Zigbee2MQTT together with a Zigbee USB 3.0 Dongle and all controlled from a custom Python based server on a Raspberry Pi, which made me lose all the access via the apps (I'm not into Home Assistant), but it's now all automated and controllable via dimmers and other events so that in my case the Phillips gateway has become obsolete.
But it was a great entry into the ecosystem, just because it was simply usable via HTTP, which allowed the best of both worlds: the apps and the ability to tinker with it all. The only thing which was missing was the real-time access to events.
Sad to see that they are turning their back on us, but let's hope that the EU notices and creates some new laws, even if it's in 10 years.
As user cricalix points out, there's also a version with an EFR32MG21, I'm not sure how they compare nowadays, see discussion on GitHub: https://github.com/Koenkk/zigbee2mqtt/discussions/14261