As a community, gamers have made a lot of stink about this in the past. Nothing has changed. I'm confused about how they ever thought we didn't care about always-on connections.
You have to translate from CEO double-speak first. What he meant was "Gamers are masochistic morons, so we thought we'd make more sales by making piracy harder than by making the game better. Our launch flopped, so we're going to try it the other way around."
They probably judged how many people care accurately, but misjudged how deeply those that do care. And how much more likely those people are to leave a review.
Helldivers 2 is still selling tons of copies even though everyone is saying that the servers can't handle the capacity. No one seems to care over there, so I can see why the Nightingale devs thought no one would care with their game either. I thought we were recovering from live service, but Helldivers shows we haven't.
I agree that live games are a problem, and helldivers 1 had an offline option, but Helldiver's 2 being always online is better executed than any other live games I've seen. And, their servers have been needed up significantly since Friday.