That's clearly the case, this is a three-pronged manoeuver :

- Introducing a cheap 1-core runner

- Lowering the price of GitHub-hosted runners

- Making it slightly more expensive to use self-hosted runners

- There is actually a fourth one: the vnet integration, which also allows you to run public runners in your own infra

As a bonus, for some people it means something that was free is now not free. Those who are willing to pay rather than go, might prefer to use GitHub-hosted if they are going to pay anyway.

This is clearly an incentive to use github-hosted, and their sales reps are also going this way.