Here's an alternative news source: "Linux Mint team wants users to upgrade, may enforce some" from gHacks (clear net only)

Anyway, I don't like where Mint is going, and here's why: in this blog post, the Mint developers said they may enforce some users to update.

In some cases the Update Manager will be able to remind you to apply updates. In a few of them it might even insist.

So I feel like that it's all downhill from there for Mint. I mean, Mint also had systemdestroy since Mint 16 "Petra", stopped supporting 32-bit processors since Mint 20 "Ulyana", and it's probably also bloated, given it's based on Ubuntu. The LTS version, but still.