Can someone explain what is the big deal of creating a Playstation account?

I see other comments have covered some of the issues, I don't see this one.

April 2011: Hackers Access Personal Data of 77 Million Sony PlayStation Network Users
May 2011: Personal Details on 25 Million Sony Online Entertainment Customers Stolen
June 2011: Sony Pictures Website Hacked, Exposing One Million Accounts
November 2014: Hackers Steal 100 Terabytes of Data from Sony Pictures
August 2017: Hacker Group Accesses Sony Social Media Accounts
September 2023: Sony Investigates Alleged Hack
October 2023: Sony Notifies Employees of Data Breach

Basically Sony's been caught before not securing anything. So people don't want to deal with them. So for this to be retroactively pushed on users months later is a solid concern. To be forced to give Sony more data than is actually required to run the game (as we've proven it isn't needed for months now). Is literally just handing it to the next hackers that access Sony's shit.

It seems a lot of people did not realize that this was an initial requirement when the game first launched, but it was suspended while they figured out server and stability issues.

That's because there's a review count requirement for both the extremely good and the extremely negative level. So you can't buy your own game, review it, and have it be overwhelmingly positive because the only review is positive. Thing is, bad games tend to not get bought by many people, so overwhelmingly negative is rare. So yes, mixed reviews are already damming.