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Full disclosure: Haven't read the article yet.
Working in corporate IT, this most likely is targeted toward enterprise customers who either take a long time to roll out OS upgrades or can't due to technical limitations within their environment. In those cases, paying the cost of extended support is more palatable to troubleshooting or rushing mass OS upgrades. This is a fairly common practice with enterprise software vendors.
Edit: Okay, just skimmed it. Looks like this is actually a new program for non-enterprise consumers, which is interesting. First I've heard of that.
It is indeed a new thing. For the reasons you've mentioned this was an option for enterprise customers for earlier versions of Windows as well, but this time they are making the option available to home consumers too. I can't really see too many people paying for this though. Those who care will move on to Windows 11 (or whatever is out there by then) and others will simply keep running an unsupported / not updated OS. In all likelihood, MS will keep providing security updates for the latter for free in the end.