Maybe, but if you poke around Graphtreon for a while and just look at the dropoffs in terms of patron counts and revenue from the time of the announcement until today, they're noticeable but they're not "OMG our world is on fire." (It's useful to click "Start on Zero" when that option is there, so you have a better visual representation of the actual drop.) Patreon could certainly have afforded to wait and see what happened after the change rolled out.

This is certainly a business decision, but image is part of their business, and part of their image is, ostensibly, listening to creators.