TL;DR: The game is changing and vets don't like it. A new generation of players is coming into the game and the game is slowly but surely changing (supposedly for the worst) because of it.

Boo f*cking hoo, things change, deal with it. Any EVE vet should know the age old adage 'adapt or die'. CCP has two options when it comes to EVE. Either stubbornly keep things the way they are and were in 2003, or keep changing and adapting to what the market wants. It should come as no surprise that doing the first option will result in EVE genuinly being dead in less than 3 years.

To name an example, EVE is one of the last big MMO's I know that still uses a subscription model. Perfectly normal back in 2003, but if you were to introduce an MMO with a subscription model now, 12 years later, people would think you're insane. No investor would back a model like that anymore. It's all microtransactions and pay to win these days. And despite the hate for both of those things in the EVE community, EVE will be letting go of the subscription model at some point if it is to survive another 10 years.

As a game, EVE Online is maturing. CCP has learned valuable lessons from observing the game and its players for 12 years and things are being changed because they need to be changed. Because if they are not changed, old players will eventually leave out of boredom and new players will leave out of frustration over broken and stupid mechanics that are relics from years ago.

As a company, CCP is never going to cater to the minority. They're going to try and cater to what the majority of players (people who pay good money to play) want without sacrificing the core gameplay that defines EVE. But one is not always possible without the other. As a result, the game is slowly changing and taking on wildly different forms and core gameplay values than 12 years ago because the players playing the game wish and demand wildly different core gameplay values than 12 years ago. That's something that happens all over the gaming industry and it would have happened to EVE regardless of major battles ending up in the news.