F-Droid and Obtanium are going away for normal android users.

Sure, and normal users haven't even heard of them, so nothing's lost.

It doesn't sound like that website's up to date.

this whole thing is absolutely about Google making more money.

F-Droid has like 4,000 apps on it. Let's say all 4k are made by different developers. The $100 registration fee would net them $400,000. That's a drop in their bucket. That's like 1 second worth of their ad revenue. They would not cause this much of a community uproar for $400k. This is absolutely about preventing scam apps.

What's really happening, I'm guessing, is Android gets a bad rap in other countries because of all the scams and people switch to iPhone. That does a lot more damage to their bottom line.

It's also way too easy for some dumb 70 y/o congressperson or business executive to install spyware on their phone, and they are putting a speed bump in front of that.

I hate Google, but come on. They're not trying to squeeze pennies out of open source developers. The fee is another speed bump to stop scammers from simply making another free developer account to spread they're malware after they get banned.