It's honestly weird to take this as "hostile towards the players". Reads as incredibly entitled to be honest. I've been playing Factorio for the better part of a decade now. These developers are literally among the most player-focused on the planet. No DLC for years, just free updates, because they worried about the ethics of how to do so responsibly, whether they should make a 2.0, etc. Years of consistent blog posts showing community engagement and investment. Get a grip and look at a company with actual anti-consumer behavior like ubisoft or activision.

Also I'm sorry but has the word "achievement" changed its meaning over the years? Achieving something should be hard. If achievements were all easy they would be meaningless. As someone who didn't even know about this before it was patched, I'm happy they're keeping the achievements as hard as they should be, and not leaving open a hidden backdoor for those who want to cheat. I've only ever 100%'d one game, and it was Hotline Miami. I don't want shit to be an easy breezy walkthrough.

If you're really just interested in achievement hunting, you can always just install an old version of the game.

I do think it makes sense to patch things like this for the same reason you don't - it's only used as an exploit and there's no legitimate use for it. Achievements tend to change difficulty with different versions of games anyway. Space age changed the difficulty of some of the base game achievements.

Speed runners will adapt.