I've been a AAA developer for almost 2 decades, and there is no way in hell they did not explicitly sign to have the sony account linking. I didn't like the way he acted on twitter acting like the poor indy dev getting wrecked by the tyrant, when he was hoping it would fly.
He thought it would be okay to sell your data for his chance at making a game. When it backfired due to popularity, he didn't take any responsibility and let sony look bad. I bet there's a lot of people at Sony who didn't like that.
I agree, he made his bigger partner look bad. Even if sony didn't force this (which I'd be surprised about), their own board probably did. "Oh you just pissed off our biggest partner, that doesn't seem great for business"