This. It's using pricing as a user behaviour mechanism.
I don't like the price increases either, but it's kind of clear they're trying to make sure multi region buckets aren't the default a user uses just because it's there. It costs gcp more to run this, and for most users multi regional doesn't make sense.
Lots of enterprise orgs don't even use multi region because of either gdpr, or regional laws. The data has to either be classified as public/not sensitive for a real use case of it.
Well this is just untrue. Read the docs. Gcp uses lots of the same infra as other Google services. The whole global load balancer infra is one and the same. Spanner is used by maps, Gmail etc. In fact, that's where the service spawned from.