Graphical downgrades on iOS in 2.5

As so many people have noticed, graphics have been downgraded in 2.5 and I’m just wondering why.

This is the first time I’ve ever seen a purposely made downgrade in any game - and it boggles me that it applies even to new devices capable of running it smoothly.

Could it be because they plan to sell pleasant graphics later through cloud gaming (so they’re essentially going to scummily monetize graphics)?

Then again, maybe not - cloud is still a technology that won’t be accessible to a huge portion of the playerbase due to how stable, fast and close to the server the connection needs to be (and with unlimited bandwidth too) so I’m not sure they’d do it because of that.

What could the reasoning behind this sort of a horrible change be? Why would they make a game that’s famous for its immersive graphics look purposely uglier even on devices that ran it with the same degree of smoothness but looking much nicer earlier?

EDIT: Playing on M1 iPads - looks worse than it did with no performance gain.