Sounds like they are. As much is compatible with a full-time, PvP sandbox game: if you don’t want to fight other groups, don’t deploy a structure. That is the new line in the sand.
Highsec is a player-controlled area as much as any other in this game and if you want to play there, build things, and influence our shared economy, well, you need to be open to interaction by the other players.
This is never going to change. I don’t want you to quit, but if you can’t accept this reality you are just going to make yourself unhappy sticking around. There are a hundred games where you can build things free of risk from other players, so I don’t know why you are playing Eve, a game that has always prominently been a single shared PvP arena with no safe spaces.
Well I kinda do: you like plying the in player-run economy this design enables, but an economy that interesting can only exist in a war/destruction-based economy. So if the anxiety this risk of attack (which honestly, is so small in highsec) outweighs the enjoyment access to this intricate economy gives you, you are probably playing the wrong game. Sunk-cost fallacy be damned, take your ball and go find something better suited to your wants and personality.