Discontinuing the downloads was a big deal to a lot of people, which generated a non-trivial amount of bad press, but if they'd simply said "we have something better in the works" then I don't think anyone would've cared. Surely this wasn't dreamt up in between then and now...?
The timing of the Releases feature only entered into the decision a little bit. It's hard to tell when something is going to ship at GitHub because there's no deadlines. Projects are done when they're done. The downside to this approach is that you can't rely on ship dates when making decisions like when to kill a feature something might replace.
Gladly I am not affected, I have not recently tried to download an abandoned binary for a project hosted on github and it was deleted without replacement, but I still feel sad about what might now be lost