alt Hacker NewsIt took me several reads to distill their post to this one sentence: "Enterprise Account contracts will no longer be offered to new customers"
I'd be glad to stand corrected but AFAICT this is the only sentence that describes the change. All other say "nothing is changing in [some area]".
Trying to downplay something to that extent immediately raises suspicious that this something (the change) is much more profound that what is stated.
Salesforce, like every large enterprise software company, has a formal (and strict) End of Life process. It starts with an announcement like this indicating End of Sales, then once the contract obligations are met, they can end support, then EoL.
There is no way they can avoid this kind of public notice.