I know it's popular to portray WotC/Hasbro as an Evil(tm) Machiavellian multinational, but...
WotC/Hasbro is following the market. The market started to change drastically six years ago (pandemic). At this point WotC/Hasbro is selling more digital D&D product then printed D&D product, and apparently this has been the case for a while. So is it surprising that they are shifting the focus to the most selling product format?
We started playing D&D 35+ years ago, yes we're old D&D players. We preferred playing in person, because we're a bunch of friends and seeing everyone in person is just more fun. I was already using a laptop for high level play as a DM back in the 3e era (due to the complexity of tracking high level combats), that wasn't ideal. But while we played in person, we didn't play that often, that was further complicated when one of our players moved to another country for work. It became really difficult when that player moved to the other side of the world. We first started playing with the rest of the group in person and one person calling in via a tablet on the table, it worked. But eventually we started using Foundry VTT, everyone at home and playing over the Internet. That worked FAR better then we ever expected, and we started playing more often as we cut the travel times, for some of us significantly. We still play when we can in person, but that's often relegated to a long weekend in a cottage us playing D&D and boardgames all day. Even if we still mostly life in the same small country, we don't live near enough for a 20min bike ride anymore. We play on Sunday mornings (every two weeks) and the folks with kids still have the whole afternoon to do things with them, while previously the added travel time meant that most of the Sunday was spent on D&D and travel.
We have four people, I'm the only one that actually uses the FVTT D&D character sheets, two still use their paper character sheets, and one does everything in Notepad (or something like that). One of us still prefers physical books strongly over digital ones, two others still buy D&D physical books, and I'm currently the only one that moved to digital only (FVTT modules, not DDB). And I'm someone that's been collecting books for decades (I own most 2e/3e/e books, plus a ton of other stuff), the reason I had to stop more physical books was due to not having anymore room in by library. One still has a collection of D&D books, another got rid of most of their collection, another just buys what they use (PHB/DMG/MM). After buying a house and moving a year ago, and realizing how much I have, the work, the cost (of moving it all), the realization that quite a bit has never been opened, and I hadn't touched 99,99% of my physical book collection in years... I'm getting ready to get rid of most of my book collection. What people don't realize is that books are heavy, and a LARGE book collection weighs a LOT! I already read and search for most D&D content (and other RPGs) digitally. Now also realize how many books fit in a 2TB iPad, how much that weighs, how big that is, and how much money (and trees) are saved...
D&D was for a long, LONG time a very small niche. Sure it was a big potato in the small field of pnp RPGs, but it was small. Eventually it got into the mainstream, and everyone rejoiced. But there's a consequence to that, when ity gets as big as it is now, they need to make/earn money on totally different scales. Small revenues and profits are not worth their time, as such, they follow the largest stream in the mainstream, and currently that is digital, but that also means other directions that many of us have complained about (but are out of scope for this discussion).
I suspect that WotC/Hasbro will continue to produce physical products, (core) rulebooks, and atleast one adventure book per year. But some more niche stuff might be relegated to digital products only, as we've seen a couple of times happen already. This is not new either, this already happend in early 3e, which is 25+ years ago. There might even have been some instances of that happening with 2e, I haven't looked too hard. The advantage then was, it were PDFs, and if you wanted to, you could print them out and bind them. With DDB that is very difficult and won't look good without some work (DTP, although you can do that these days with Affinity for free).
And there have been some complaints about not 'owning' the content. First let me correct that, you NEVER owned the content! You owned the physical medium the content was in. With DDB, just as with the 4e equivalent, when they pull the plug, you don't have anything. You can export those product though to html or even certain VTTs with intermediary applications/services. BUT there are also other licensed VTTs that have official D&D content that isn't directly connected to a web service. Fantasy Grounds and Foundry VTT for example you run locally, and you can locally download and backup the content. That's why I'm buying the FVTT D&D content, making both backups of FVTT on my NAS, as well as the (paid) modules, and if I want, I can always run older versions of the software locally. Heck, I'm even making modules of products that aren't available officially on FVTT for our group use.
There might come a time in the future where WotC/Hasbro no longer see any benefit in selling physical books. As the digital share becomes larger, the physical share becomes smaller, production costs go up and aren't compensated by more sales, books will get more and more expensive. Adventures in Faerun (288 pages) is already $75 MSRP, that's already 20% above US inflation for the last couple of decades. One person in my group bought both Faerun books physically and didn't think (after the fact) that they were worth that price, as more and more people experience that, less and less will be sold, the higher the price goes. That effect snowballs to eventually unsustainable numbers, with maybe POD and special editions as the exception... I doubt we'll see that happen soon for something like the PHB/DMG/MM and a starterbox, but for world specific splat books, that could certainly happen...
And again a (physical) D&D product becomes a niche for those that prefer physical products. Most of us have dealt with that situation before, you can as well in the future when that happens. You can also keep playing with what you have, look outside of official D&D, other systems that aren't chained to mainstream expectations, etc.
And let's be clear, we were already playing D&D on Foundry VTT without official support. People can build the systems without official approval and folks can add the content themselves. They can still do that today with the official stuff being out, but most of us with a brain prefer to spend the $30/module (module=book) then mess with entering things manually, we tend to do that only when there's no other choice (It's a LOT of work and time=money). Even if WotC/Hasbro 'forced' everyone to DDB tomorrow, I have enough D&D5e material 'ready' to last us a decade, and I could easily have enough to last us a lifetime...
