Unannounced Change: The maximum number of ingame chat channels has been reduced from 20 to 5?

It appears that sometime yesterday (presumably in the patch?), Cryptic changed the maximum number of ingame chat channels that you can subscribe to read/post in. It seems to have been reduced from 20, down to 5, with the following error message appearing if you try to join a 6th channel:

[System]You cannot subscribe to more than 5 channels.

If you had previously joined more than 5 channels, you will not lose access to them, but you cannot join any more until you get down to less than the cap of 5. This means that if you leave one, you will not be able to rejoin it until you are under the cap.

Please note that this is not related to the restrictions around being a 'new account' (ie: the restrictions on using chat until an account has >20hrs ingame or has bought zen). This affects my own account - and I have been playing for around 8 years and have made multiple $ purchases. It also affects all of the 5-6 other players I have consulted with - all of who have played the game for some time, have LTS, etc.

This change was not documented, so has been made for unknown reasons. Its unclear if its just a temporary measure or is a permanent reduction. I'm therefore personally withholding my judgement for now.

However, if it is permanent, I fear it will have a negative quality of life impact: a channel cap of 5 is frankly extremely low. There are several global channels like Redditchat, NoP Public Service, the DPS channels, that are pretty essential for keeping track of what is going on socially - these basically take up most/all of the cap, making it much harder to interact with people outside these bubbles.

Established players will only be partially affected for now (as they will not be kicked out of the channels they are already in), but will be unable to join anything new until they get under the cap.

Views? Or is anyone able to shed any insights on whether this is permanent or temporary?