EVE Online's devs have always been bumbling, corrupt, greedy assholes. Some of this may not make sense to you, but hope enough does to see that here.
I could talk for weeks about the sheer nepotistic corrupt bullshit in the early years, when an Ayn Rand roleplaying group (not kidding, they were called "Taggart Transdimensional") got unique advantages from the devs that no one else could access all in the name of "roleplaying." They conjured up fictional characters that gave those advantages (the very first and exclusive t2 mining laser blueprint originals) to their Randroid favorites, and over and over again changed the rules to fit their favorites, year after year.
The dystopian corruption of the setting was coming from inside the development company.
Fredrik Knudsen's video on EVE is really fascinating stuff, though more focused on in-universe events. I don't recall him even bringing this up in the vid which seems like a huge miss, I just recall various claims of admins giving benefits to certain users unchecked for a while. Also tracks with the monetization changes the devs made that universally pissed off their whole playerbase, unironic lolbertarians are wild