I support the intent for sure. But we’re any of these operations being utilized by the accounts previously? The lock to some of the withdrawal & transfer operations may be defensive against stake being moved around to circumvent this soft fork, but seem like they could impede regular business operations as well.
Most likely this would be a temporary situation leveraging the community's shared vision of what these stakes would be used for. However, there would need to be a lot of trust involved there because despite convincing assurances, once unfrozen the stake could be used in any manner of destructive ways. In this situation, for now, the phrase "Defense is the best Offense" applies, I feel.
The accounts have new owners, so history of voting or not voting is largely irrelevant towards the intentions of the new owners. What is relevant is that under the old ownership, there weren't incentives to act against the blockchain whereas with the new owner, it is less clear. Transactions that allowed for the creation and delegation of new accounts have not been impeded.
But it does limit the stake to only creating and delegating to new accounts. Were these the accounts that were powering down and doing programmatic selling of Steem for instance? Do we know that Justin Sun is now paying Steemit Inc. employees and operations out of pocket or could this move essentially shut off Steemit Inc. funding otherwise? I understand this is intended as temporary, but it still cuts out alot of legitimate use cases of funds "earmarked solely for the development of the Steem ecosystem" so real negotiations and hardforked governance changes need to happen soon.
That is the idea. This has been done by a community of witnesses to assert the blockchain's continuance, primarily by temporarily removing the potential for a single-party decision to hard fork.