Sure, and they could be completely lying their asses off, but assuming they're lying their asses off and speculating on the basis that it's a PO-like fiddly and abuse-able points system, which by no definition was straightforward or simple, seems like pretty wild behaviour.
This is actually not necessarily true.
You're making an assumption. You're assuming that the pools will be tightly balanced against each other. That's not necessarily the case. The pools may well be designed more around what makes sense, rather than tight balance. And your "pools are just point buy with a friendly face" is a meaningless statement. That's like saying "cars are just two motorcycles with a shell over them!" or something. Pools don't function the same way as point-buy. Particularly not if you don't try and tightly balance them, but instead work thematically or whatever.
Indeed, it's hard to see how they even could do pools and do them as tightly balanced as you're suggesting (which is basically that they're all super-balanced little packages, where all the options for a given pool might as well say "15pts" next to them), because the races themselves are just nowhere near that well-balanced right now.
If we tried to do a fairly objective point-buy system on the existing races, where, say, a Wood Elf was like 50 points, then I daresay that we could probably value other races between about 55 and 20 points, maybe even lower. I don't see how they could really apply a "hidden" points-based system to that unless they're just going to massively re-jig every race.
Now, you may be right - if they do what you're suggesting, then it will matter
less, except the system will be a lot more accessible (which is a legitimate gain). But you are assuming to get there.
Also as
@FrogReaver points out, packaging stuff together prevents one of the worst kind of min-maxing, which is dumping a bunch of minor-but-perhaps-flavourful stuff in order to purchase one OP thing. That plus the increased accessibility, mean that there is a meaningful difference between point-buy and pools of packages, even in your scenario.