Everything about the internet for the last 10 years seems to have exclusively boiled down to building tools to control and ban people.

Reddit used to just, at worst, ban you from a single community. Then the power moderators began expanding bans to their entire 'network'. Automoderator tools to ban people for having accounts that are 'too new'. "You are doing that too much, try again in 9 minutes". Messaging the moderators used to get you a 72 hour mute, now it's 28 days. And now every time you get banned from a community, you almost always get a site-wide ban at the same time.

We used to have mIRC for chat. Then Discord centralized it, and then added phone number verifications. I've seen channels where they literally require you to link you Google and Steam accounts to 'verify'.

Can't use Twitter or anything without a phone number, so they can more permanently ban you.

This change is 100% so they can ban your entire PSN account for 'TOS violations', since they can't ban your entire Steam account.