It's unfortunate. However, it's been shown over and over to have the best conversion rate for getting people's emails, so it's a trend that's only going to become more popular from here (until the next high conversion pattern is developed).
I think it's only for mobile versions of a website:
"To improve the mobile search experience, after January 10, 2017, pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as highly."
They define what is acceptable and not right after. I like the move though !
Sure, it's great in that one metric. But annoying me with the offer to get a bunch of emails I don't want isn't making me like your site.
Even if I was the odd one and nobody else would mind those pop-ups: In the context of multiple experiments showing that a few hundred milliseconds additional page load time have a very real impact on engagement rates it stands to reason that interrupting the user experience with unrelated email sign ups should have a similar effect.
