If that were true, Apple would just add limiting Airdrop to 10 minutes as an additional default option. Removing Always on airdrop was done because it's the only form of community communications that doesn't go through the Censors.
Apple changes features and removes configurations ("simplifies") all the time. They have a strong bias towards not adding options.
Good defaults and good options are not mutually exclusive.
Just a coincidence that this gets rolled out 9 years after Airdrop debuted.
That's literally the definition of coincidence: unrelated things happening at the same time.
Interestingly, there are two different meanings: (1) accidentally happening at the same time; (2) co-occurrence (_without_ any implication about causality)