If you are growing your channel, doing all the right things and getting the correct exposure, or you decide to go down the viral/click-bait route, reaching 10,000 lifetime views should not take that long to achieve, given that time to reach that mark, you probably are still in the process of fine-tuning your content, style, brand, etc.
Personally I don't see it as something bad, because if you aren't at 10,000 lifetime views yet, I highly doubt your earnings via monetization is that much which will impact you greatly in terms of financial. Those that were already doing monetization and having the feature removed, whatever earnings you had are still there till you are able to reach the 10,000 mark and meet the minimum $100 threshold.
I do see YT point of trying to prevent people from starting new channels, stealing/re-uploading content to cash-in on a quick monetization before anyone (or the original creator) realizes what's happening.
There was another thread talking about how ads are only going to run on more popular videos, I see that as inline with this action YT is taking, all of this is to ensure ads will run on wider viewed content, making advertisers happy.
Yeah, YT is not here to make uploaders happy, advertisers foot the bills (and monetization payouts) so it's in YT best interest to keep them happy.
Still curious to see what Dan has to say about this though. Don't keep us in suspense!