Exactly as you suspect. This change makes it better for highly staked wallets to curate to the limit of their stake. They need to run out of mana to maximize their ROI from curation rewards. HBD-funder posts and comments are voted 100% by the highly staked and 20 of them at a time are published to enable them to totally drain their mana and gain the most curation rewards possible to them - without actually curating any content created by we plebs. This is one of the primary results of HF 28, and it may well be the beginning of the end of Hive as social media, because it sucks the money out of curation of organic media creation.

Edit: OOM again. Here's a tip.