I doubt that it's a honeypot , they have been slowly banning private plex4shares for a while now this isn't new , they are all moving to other server/clients now

>tying the consumed media to a specific ip that can be used to tie to a specific person.

A server in a data center will also have a specific IP tied to a specific person (customer of data center or ISP), assuming the server is supposed to be remotely accessible in a reliable way.

Honestly, a change in management could turn it into that. Then suddenly the collected data becomes useful.

I wonder the same thing. It had a lot of 'renegade cool kid' energy early on, I suspect this was done on purpose. However, if you look at the investors, and people working on the project now (lot of industry types) it's moved slowly into the corporate sphere. I think rather than legal assault, they are going to slowly start to boil the frog and users will find themselves in a system that differs radically from what they expected (or want) and by that time moving all their files etc will be too much. I stayed far away, and have supported Kodi the entire time.

I think this is closer to the real reason.

They’re doing it as part of a charm offensive to partner with content creators.

I think you got it

I wonder if their forced login puts them in a position where they’re going to end up doing surveillance and betraying their users that are pirating content.