As an individual that 'dozen people beta test' is required. It's not required if you're a business. Also depends on when your account was created.

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

Same happened to me yesterday, I published a new app and it was reviewed and published within a few hours without any beta testing. but I think this is why I see people ready to buy old playstore accounts for real money, maybe this only affects new accounts

I'm just working on my first app (thanks to AI...) and if you have a new dev account created sometime after 2023 they are making you do a 12 person, 14 day beta run before anything else occurs, apparently.

It gets worse! If Google decides the people in your test don't engage enough and/or you didn't respond to their feedback, they may not give you production access. I've got a game that's available on iOS, I released there first and did lots of testing to deal with the low-hanging bugs. After doing the 14 day test Google emailed me:

Possible reasons why your production access could not be granted include:

    - Testers were not engaged with your app during your closed test
    - You didn't follow testing best practices, which may include gathering and acting on user feedback through updates to your app

I think it only applies to newer accounts and individual rather than company accounts. To make things worse, Google doesn't allow you to switch an account from individual > company. You need to create a whole new account.