They're waiving the requirement for this game, the upcoming Ghost of Tsushima still requires a PSN account to play the multiplayer DLC and we don't know what the actually no requirement for PSN on Helldivers 2 is yet. My guess is that while we don't have to sign up, cross play will be disabled, which will of course hurt PSN players more than PC players.
I have no confidence in Sony or any AAA publisher to do the right thing when executives with MBA's and shareholder profits tied to their bonuses are involved but I'll take a win if for this one little battle, the consumers won out.
Most likely because Sony wouldn't have any recourse to take action (e.g.: ban) any players that are violating terms of use that PSN players are required to agree to (obvious examples would be harassment / offensive language that most services will minimally voice/chat ban for).
We haven't won until the region sales restrictions implementation to avoid legal issues of imposing PSN is rolled back. Fellow divers got refunds, we haven't won until everyone can return to diving.
As far as I'm concerned people are far too eager to call this a win and take Sony at their word without actually caring about the result.
To head off obvious responses Steam doesn't impose restrictions on their own, the publisher is in control on sales and it takes no time at all for Steam to update. So why hasn't Sony done this trivial act already? Because they'll try this again later when they legally can.
Unfortunately that's just the way the industry is going. They'd rather just have overreach and excessive power than deal with the back and forth fight of countering hackers and cheats. I understand why they'd go that way, it's disappointing and concerning, but it's becoming more and more common.
You could run such games on a separate machine (provided you had the funds), but that's a big buy in for a single game.
Different people have different tolerances or are ignorant, not stupid. Maybe don't be so condescending to people and you'd get better responses.
The irony has layers. Sad to see, and I should've anticipated it, but... I still had hope for the species, I guess? Ho hum. Back to inevitability, I suppose.
Sony likely won't try a blanket requirement again, however, they could try to do some kind of stealthy rollout, where non PSN players just get more and restricted to annoy them into signing up for PSN.