Anyway, the doctrine pushed at the time by cisco was embedding a password into a router was only for home or VERY small business users. Anyone with more than, say, 4 routers or so should be using some form of network authentication.
We had network auth in the very early 00s although all our routers had an emergency console password configured in (had to use it once, looked like 80 characters of line noise, maybe it was). That was in a sealed envelop in a lockbox. Because he had to update every router manually if that envelope opened, our one security guy got pretty annoyed if anyone ripped the envelope open.
Anyway the point that might be missed is in a carrot and stick method, this might be a very extreme application of the stick to get people to use network AAA systems instead of configuring their console and enable passwords in each router.
I guess modern cisco routers/IOS can do LDAP and KERBEROS its not all RADIUS from 1993, although old stuff does work.
I will say that in the dark days before we went network AAA it was an absolute nightmare when someone on the team quit and someone had to go manually thru every router on the network and change the passwords and distribute the new one to us all.
This will negatively impact people with 1990s architecture, but to the extent that they're already in a living hell anyway it won't be much worse.
Unfortunately I've worked at a few places with non-internet connected routers (or so they thought, anyway) where documentation was so poor you basically had to break in each time you needed access. Physical access to do hard recovery via a reboot was a PITA. Making it "easier to break in" would be seen as a feature not a bug in those locations.