Really not sure why you'd think this is "doubling down"?

We've already gone through the StartCom verification process, but had only generated a few specific cert's for subdomains.

However, we're right now in the process of launching a new online project. No idea what subdomains will be needed in very near future.

It costs us no extra to generate wildcard ones, which obviously is the right move to do as they'll be valid while StartCom's new ones are no longer trusted (when Mozilla stops accepting new certs).

There's literally no way we could afford to pay for new certs from an alternative registrar instead.

> There's literally no way we could afford to pay for new certs from an alternative registrar instead.

If ~$100 is that much for you (as a company of some sort) why don't you use Letsencrypt?

Good point, that might be the better solution for the public HTTPS part of things.

Lets Encrypt doesn't provide MS Authenticode signing certs (eg to validate our downloads are legit) though. Hopefully this whole mess doesn't scope creep to include those too.

You bet it will. If MS does not revoke them, it will reflect very badly on the security of their program.

If anything, I'd expect code signing certificates to be at more risk. Usage of these certificates is inherently much more difficult to track, as signed executables are much harder to discover than web servers. As such, even if there were a "certificate transparency" process for code signing certificates (which I don't believe there is), it'd be difficult to prove it was being operated honestly.