There's a link on the bottom of this post to another post from today announcing that Sony will be discontinuing physical disc production for all Playstation consoles in 2028. I guess the combination of the two announcements means that going forward, you'll only be able to purchase games for as long as Sony cares to keep selling them.

→ To ease the transition, players will still be able to download previously purchased content after the closing date for the foreseeable future.

does this literally mean what I think it means, you get up to a certain date a chance to download purchased content, and… will that content play without calling PSN servers? and download whereto, an external HDD, can I make copies of my HDD?

The store's been buggy for a while, and I guess Sony doesn't feel like putting in the effort to keep it up (the return on investment isn't there).

We should have seen this coming back in 2006. I'm sure someone did.