I mean it isn't a coincidence. But this framing is pretty negative.

These apps broke and started crashing because they were updating the start menu. Probably related to the addition of ads.

Then they blocked these versions because they were crashing.

It doesn't seem like they are making any effort to block versions that don't cause crashes. (Other than maybe making it a bit harder to keep updating to new internal APIs)

It really doesn't seem like they are purposely breaking these tools so that more people see the ads. It is probably such a tiny market that they don't care at this point. They'll definitely ship the ads to 99.9% of users first before they worry about this unaddressed market.