I 100% agree, if you can sign up without a phone call, you should be able to cancel without one. However, at the end of the day, it's just a phone call. It gets a bit dramatic.
As a customer, guess what? I get it, it'll take longer to get my stuff. No big deal. It means a lot of people are being responsible, shopping online, and hopefully sending gifts rather than spreading COVID. Retailers should just not make shipping promises they can't keep, reasonable people will understand.
The new owner is the developer of pinboard.in. The pinboard API was modeled after del.icio.us, so it might just be a data import into pinboard exercise.