It's a dumb & very counter-productive policy and will choke off the supply of new Android devs. Ironically it's now much easier to launch a new app on the Apple App Store than it is on Android.
I've done both and I'd say Apple is still lagging behind even with this stupid move from Google. It's hard to understate how little sense everything related to appstoreconnect and the dev account makes.
I recently launched a new app on both app stores. I was up and running in a day on iOS. It took me almost three weeks and a huge amount of red tape on Android.
Since launch I've done a number of updates and the review process is always faster on iOS too.