So did they just blatantly want tumblr to burn, or was it kind of a situation where they wanted to “make the platform more advertiser friendly” and then decided to make that decision without consulting their userbase or understanding the statistics of their userbases’ use?

I dunno. This current model of advertisers bankrolling the infrastructure that makes up the internet isn’t really working out, though, especially when most of these advertisers are super prudish, or, more likely than not, use prudishness as an easy way to basically just have iron-fisted control over these platforms. So kind of through that mechanism they can totally control the platforms that people are using.