For someone who is an observant person making a living in the industry, fully immersed in day to day affairs, trends, outcomes and even has a webshow based around being insightfully observant. How can you look the effect and disregard/ignore/miss the cause?
Its simple, the concept of ostracizing single player is an intended effect. These people WANT you to feel bad for not playing with other people. They want you to think every game MUST have multiplayer components. They want online connectivity to be a standardized gaming element.
These people do not care how "unhealthy" it might be to not socialize. They actually like it when players spend 16+ hours a day playing their products instead of engaging in real life. It does not bother them when a kid dies of DVT due to abysmal habits and failing priorities.
They proactively are pushing this to indoctrinate gamers. They want gamers to accept these impositions as givens to create industry standard.
Why?
Because it gives them the ability to control the products, even after sale which they have no right to. It grants them accessibility and freedom to utilize their product as marketing tools to spur on further and perpetual sales. They view their games as gamers willingly paying to have a full size corporate owned billboard in their front yard. It gives them a foot in your door to push DLC, expansions, sequels, other products while you foot the broadband bill to deliver their "important messages from our sponsors" How can they achieve this level of free marketing, guilt sales, cosmetic add ons, DLCs all the while keeping you connected to THEIR servers to ensure that despite proactively purchasing it, you arent pirating it? If you arent plugged in they have to go back to relying on expensive techniques like paying for advertisements, or developing a game good enough to generate word of mouth buzz. Worst part is, you cant even fault them for trying to do it, because it is just an extension of what they are supposed to do as a company, generate profit while reducing overhead. Capitalism Ahoy! Right?..... Right?
Getting tweaked over the effect is impractical if you did not see or chose to ignore the cause.