As a user, I agree that features which give users control and agency are preferable to increasingly opaque ML. But as business decisions go, this argument is terrible. The subset of users who bother to post new ideas to the community forum won't be large enough to affect Spotify's bottom line, and these users are almost certainly not representative of the average user (who probably doesn't realize the community feature exists).

Spotify isn't optimizing for placating the vocal minority of power users, they're trying to increase their paid subscription count. It would be great if we lived in a world where these were the same thing, but they clearly aren't.