Meta/Facebook and Instagram are money machines: they understood that people were getting money on their platform through paid sponsorships and more, so they decided to put a tax on them. I do not see wrong or right things here. Just a tax for verified people that are usually already monetizing their contents there.
Anyway, I know some sportmen (from wheelchair basketball) that had few thousands of followers, they were not monetizing the account and yet they were verified because they won World Championships and many other important stuffs so they thought to verify theirsevles. It's a pity that they will have eventually to pay for it as well an in this perspective, I would have created the "free scholarship" for people not monetizing their account. But that would have requested more investment from platforms for verifications.
So, after all, who has the power makes the law. We can simply hope that they are fair and to start engaging with decentralized platforms!
It is a slippry slope in terms of who will need to be verified though, as it will also come down to advertising etc. Because for example, verified will get more impressions, so what happens to the feeds of the unverified?
I think that in the end, the same story of paid ads on Facebook will happen. If you spend money advertising your Page, you will have some audience and you will compare in the feed even when you are not spending money. Otherwise, there will be oblivion