Clearly it wasn’t a show stopper for all their existing users, who are now paying two engineers their salaries.
To be fair, though, I’m largely in agreement with you in this case. For products like cloud infrastructure, where the company is fronting real costs, the requirement makes sense to prevent abuse. But this product has low marginal cost per user, and also loses all of its value if a user recreates his account.
Unless, of course, you could import historial data somehow. But then maybe just make that feature not available on trial.