In the fast majority of real cases, staying neutral is definitelly a thing. Even our world wars had neutral parties.
This is just some extremely far fetched reasonning to try to justify how devs applying consequences of an event on players who just don’t want to play this event is anything else than an attempt to push more people to play the said event.
The vast majority of the playerbase don’t give a F about this content, that doesn’t suits their current agenda, so they remove the possibility to just not take part in the event.
And that can be considered fair, to some degree. Their plan is to put the Trig invasion at the center of the attention, so they push players towards it.
But at least, accept this patch for what it is. It’s an attempt to push players (not “force” them, but not far from it) to take part in what CCP wants to be the current main activity of their playerbase. There is no moral story of “suffering consequences for your actions” behind it.
If it was about consequences for our choices, then we should actually have the choice to stay neutrals and to have consequences adaptated to neutral 3rd party.
And don’t try to just go like “But no because it’s a war that includes all New Eden so you can’t be neutral!!” when half the NPC factions are not involved in any away, and half of New Eden (Null Sec) can’t be affected by the event.