Ukrainians need connectivity to transmit video out of their country in real time. Starlink dishes are going to be an increasingly important fraction of the bandwidth in and out of Ukraine as the conflict continues and Russia gains control of the physical network. Targeting starlink dishes greatly increases the perceived risk of operating one of the dishes, even if the actual increase in risk is small.
Based on the pre-war intelligence the US shared, it appears Putin hoped to sway world opinions with his own faked and false flag videos. There is no way his studios could produce as much content with as much power as an entire nation of citizens carrying cell phones in a war zone can produce. Connectivity during wartime is going to be the new air combat superiority - in any future war it will be perceived as the most important battle for the invader to win first.
Fortunately for defenders, among the focuses for the DarpaNet research effort that morphed into our modern Internet, communications survivability under attack was an explicit systems design goal, and some of those original research concepts still remain in our modern Internet.
Ukraine is using bandwidth as a strategic weapon against Putin, and Putin is trying to neutralize that opposing weapon. The increase in risk to dish operators doesn't need to be that large to disproportionately increase the odds that individual dishes are kept off-line. The more that are kept off-line, the easier it is for Putin to concentrate forces on the dishes that are online, greatly increasing the actual risk to the dish operators who are online.
Second question: would sales of these transmitters increase or decrease based on the outcomes you've presented in your first answer?
(there's plenty of potential for benefits from additional and redundant access to data; it's important to balance the risks and rewards appropriately)
I wouldn’t use a starlink dish at a military command post trying to hide in a forest, but no one would do that.