All I can say is I predicted this when Garmin announced built-in monetization for the CIQ store *and* they started monetizing their own "all-star" versions of Garmin watchfaces (where Garmin clones their own built-in watchfaces for other devices, via CIQ). I think another hint of this was when they rejected someone's watchface for containing a Garmin trademark like "Epix".
I said that it would make sense for Garmin to stop 3rd parties from cloning Garmin watchfaces, and a few people scoffed, claiming Garmin would have no reason or justification to do so. (But the reason is to avoid competition for their paid watchfaces from free watchfaces, and the justification is either copyright law and/or they can do whatever they want with their app store since they're not a monopoly on the level of Google or Apple. Besides, I doubt anyone can make the argument with a straight face that Garmin should be obligated to host clones of its own watchfaces.)
My favourite argument against this then-hypothetical practice was that some of the free 3rd-party watchfaces were better than the Garmin CIQ clones. Yeah, that's actually another reason for Garmin to shut them down, unfortunately.
While I'm not happy about this news, can anyone really say they're surprised?
https://ko-fi.com/post/Update--2-Upcoming-faces-and-cancelled-Forerunner-C0C31FKMEH
"Garmin has apparently tightened the guidelines for watchface creators to prevent them from creating watch faces that resemble those of Garmin watches"
