It was a very simmilar type of illogical decision.
You say that now, after your conclusion was originally the opposite. Which is a positive development! (Support using existing email accounts (not requiring dedicated accounts))
However, what you call “streamlined contact requests” is again actually breaking the compatibility with standard email accounts.
The new default now ignores (blocks) all chat contact requests coming from classic email clients. It introduces a completely unnecessary configuration option and causes a hard fragmentation (configuration differences) among the installed Email-chat clients.
Instead, it would be possible (and this has been brought up sufficiently), to only consider very short newly incoming email messages to be potential contact requests for chatting (i.e. to introduce a default size limit of say 350 characters).
Back on topic, things aren’t right also, if devs don’t see or want to see how “invite friends” can help users with good templates. The template is actually even editable within deltachat, before it gets opened in the other app.
It may be a strong indicator to think about on what basis decisions, especially dismissing, closing and disabling ones, are made.