As we look at usage of that and the number of people that were redeeming those and using them, it was just not a feature that was available in Crunchyroll and isn’t in our roadmap.
I'll translate corporate dickhead for those in need.
"We determined that the number of people who would be impacted would be low enough to avoid real blowback, so we decided to fuck those people in the Crunchyroll with a rusty Buster Sword because really, who cares what some anime nerd thinks anyway?"
Ideally, they would be forced to honor the "forever" promise in perpetuity. Alternately, forcing them to issue physical copies of equivalent quality to every impacted customer for every title they were to have "forever" access to would be reasonable. Plus, you know, a massive 'acting like complete dicks' penalty for trying to pull this nonsense.
As mentioned, some of the “purchases” were actually includes for a physical purchase. Meaning “buy this physical copy, get the digital copy free!” So a physical copy isn’t actually that great.
Granted, a digital copy was going to inevitably become inaccessible one way or another. No company exists forever, for instance. But “oops we bought another company and merged their tech stack” isn’t an acceptable “end of service” point imho.