About 5 years ago when the Halo Master Chief Collection came out on Steam, I was in a very similar situation. MCC requires an XBOX Live account, even if you were only going to be playing single-player. while I was kinda interested in picking it up to have all the campaigns on PC (especially ODST) there was no way I was making and linking an unnecessary XBOX account. (Similarly, that's why I only use local accounts on Windows, I never link them to a Microsoft account.)

Now Helldivers does the same thing just with Sony instead of Microsoft? Screw. You. You obviously do not need it for technical reasons.

by enabling the banning of players

Steam players can get banned if they do something egregious.

It also allows those players that have been banned the right to appeal

Pretty sure you can appeal Steam bans.

So what is this? Is Sony giving you a pile of money for this, or do you want to enforce a much stricter code of conduct on people? Or both?

At least the Twitter and Steam comments are mostly roasting you. Hopefully the Steam players follow through though and we see the numbers tank dramatically (though, they are already down by 2/3 from the peak as-is)