Is the story being told true?
Definitely not. During the 2-C DC herald revisions, there was a rumor being spread that a staff member "took advantage of his trip to shut down the upgrades for good," but said staff member literally hosted the follow-up thread himself immediately after, and asked the staff members handling it why they were taking so long with the upgrades.
What prompted such a massive change in opinion?
I think I first became suspicious when looking over some of the DC profiles (I'm talking long before I even signed up for a profile on this site). Maybe I just wasn't looking hard enough at that point, but I found the 1-A/High 1-A/Tier 0 justifications weirdly absent from the profiles. With Marvel for instance, 2-A profiles for Mephisto or Celestials gave multiversal statements, or Eternity's Tier 1 profile mentioned "Doctor Strange could see in many more dimensions than 4 after fusing with him." Meanwhile for DC, only a select few profiles
like Pralaya mentioned actual cosmology justifications. I remember reading The Writer's profile multiple times over and being bewildered like "how on earth does this guy fit the Tier 0 requirements???"
Then honestly, after the initial shock value of "holy sh*t, vsbw downgraded Darkseid to 2-C and The Presence to 1-C" wore off, I started looking over the actual reasoning for the downgrades and realized that I had felt "obligated" to scale DC higher all that time because it "felt right" and never had a basis for placing them that high. Just think back to the Writer to get an idea of how outdated the ratings were before.
For some reason, The Writer was given a Boundless rating for having "true R>F" transcendence? There was never any basis for this amongst the standards, and looking over the old threads in favor of this, it was practically handed out on a whim. This wasn't how author avatars were treated, no matter how "meta" they were. It's funny looking over the threads regarding it, noticing how over time, basically everyone was on board with removing it eventually after realizing it made absolutely no sense. I don't know, it's weird seeing people off-site say "Vsbw is so biased now, they used to have The Writer at Tier 0!" When in actuality, The Writer's Boundless rating was an example of bias
towards DC if anything and was practically a well-admitted mistake.
I've seen nearly every argument for Infinite-Dimensional DC by now, and I don't think any of them are all that good. No matter how solid an infinite-dimensional scan is, it seems there's always one problem or another. Even the one infinite-dimensional scan that's indisputable is from a creator-owned Vertigo work called Millenium Fever. I don't want to consider DC's cosmology 1-A or High 1-A on a personal level just to uphold this ages-long comicvine notion that Skyfathers are equal to New Gods, Beyonders are equal to Hands, Beyonder is equal to Lucifer, and The Presence is equal to The One Above All. Plenty of verses have faced massive cosmology downgrade metas like Umineko, Masadaverse, Demonbane, or Tenchi Muyo, and I noticed people are far more open-minded when it comes to the idea that "SCP, SMT, or Umineko could get debunked to hyperversal" while the idea that DC doesn't reach 1-A gets met with special hostility.
Let me refer back to an experience I've had recently. I've debated DC cosmology for months with a friend who uses CSAP Tiering and considers DC High 1-A whereas based on my personal standards, I'd honestly place DC's composite canon cosmology at 30 to 40 dimensional. I was never able to convince him that the God Sphere being beyond-dimensional was inconsistent, so I recalled something I heard from an anti-powerscaling rant like "nowadays, I just ask powerscalers
exactly what evidence it'd take to convince them so as to not waste my time," so I asked him just that. Eventually, I cornered him into admitting that he would never change his mind on the God Sphere being beyond-dimensional even if I found 50 to 70 statements suggesting otherwise (compared to his several). He then got angry and kept screaming "you're so biased against DC and close-minded" and said debating me was as useless as debating a n*zi, and has made a weird habit of going around powerscaling communities ranting at people about my "bias."
What's funny is that if an upgrade for Tier 0/High 1-A+ DeMatteis cosmology was posted, I'd most likely agree with it (still disagree with the High 1-A stuff and the hierarchy of dream worlds though). I just use vsbw's old Tiering System on a personal level (no gripes with the new one), hence why if you encountered me on reddit or discord, I'd insist that the composite canon cosmology doesn't reach 1-A or even High 1-B. I have no problems with DC being 1-A and above, it's just that I'm only willing to accept that with clear arguments for hierarchies, and not out of obligation to "keep up with Marvel" or anything like that.