You are technically right that Docker changed their stance since their original announcement.
But they committed to remove all images within 30 days, and I think you'll find that's the understanding that many had - in fact there were hundreds of Hacker News comments because of this.
We brought it forward so we could handle the fall-out outside of KubeCon which would fall during the date of the deletion.
Since their original statement they have done a U-Turn and won't delete images from open source organisations.
But it's already too late - many maintainers like myself have already had to take action. Because we took Docker Inc. at their word.
This mainly affects Community Edition users (free users) who haven't updated their cluster in over two years.
It may also affect you if you maintain your own fork of our official templates, or your own custom templates.