I can’t speak to the Zed team’s motivations for this, but unless it’s a big corp pulling a move like this it’s usually not that nefarious. Having been in these kinds of product conversations it’s more like, “that thing we prototyped? I we think it’s stable and usable enough for beta. We’re not sure how to price it yet, but let’s give it to our customers to play around with and give us some feedback while we figure out what to tweak and how much it’s worth”.