I think this is something CCP has been pushing since about 2012 or so. I posted about it a while back:
I suspect CCP is focusing on the fact that very large groups generate very large actions that make the gaming news: big nullsec battles, big wars, big losses. And they apparently feel that news generates a lot of potential new players for them. Or perhaps “big alliances with big wars” just feels like their EVE vision to them.
The problem with that view is that as groups get larger, the game becomes increasingly stagnant. Fewer groups with larger territories means fewer things to fight over. Huge alliances means wars become too costly to wage, when considering any potential gain to be had.
Having one or two large ‘news’ events per year only to have extreme stagnation the rest of the year isn’t a good tradeoff. You end up with bored large groups basically absorbing or driving off smaller group action all year long.
I don’t really care if the expansion is Null oriented, or even if it seems to be “make Null a huge profit zone again”. But I definitely feel that CCP has to at some point find ways to make smaller groups more effective and useful and stop trying to drive everyone into joining mega-alliances.