This is a bugs forum, not a complaint forum. However, I don't mind clarifying the situation, as long as it doesn't turn into a discussion (I will not allow that, as this is not the place for it).
There were times when FAs did not exist. There were times when most players ended up as FAs. These things change. The free agency is a market regulation tool. It is not intended to save players that someone would like. No, we prefer trades to be between human teams, not humans and bots. Also, we are constantly analyzing the market and making changes as we see fit. In this case, the decision was to severely limit the amount of players released as FAs, which is still better than completely eliminating them. The players that are released need to fill a certain gaps in the market, gaps where players reach unnecessarily high prices. Like high skilled top potential 18 year olds and such. So we included them and removed most of the usual FAs that used to clutter the market. Like 30+ high salary players. Those had really low prices and were actually affecting the way the game is played (LI dominance was partly caused by this). Now, logic says we don't need more of those in the market so we cut them.
This just happens to be in line with the real life situation where only top talent doesn't retire early. People that don't see their sports careers sustaining them just move away from them eventually. Others get injured or demotivated. Some even decide to retire early as they feel they have earned enough or can't deal with the pressure. As you see, we are not trying to completely imitate real life, but it is a nice analogy to use, so we did. And that's why we explained it like that in the news post.