Welcome, Edwin!
That indeed would be a policy change. Needing to spend the money.
That would imply that one can only make usage at “free tier” levels (of the past free trial), despite having a paid and funded account, initially loaded with up to $100. Tier-0 (with no “free tier” now shown in the UI) gives only 3 RPM limits to language models, and yet, a never-funded account includes gpt-image-1 in the rate limits page with values (but no separate “images per minute” field that seems the actual limit).
I would look closer to see if it isn’t a payment network problem as I describe has occurred in the past - like a whole block of new paying subscribers receiving no tier upgrade and reaching the forum at once in a spurt.
Or for users, the standard advice: generate a new API key, pay attention to any phone number challenges at that time, do not set any limits on it, use that in your application and try the Playground then.
Or a prior answer among dozens of anecdotes of “okay, I paid another $5 and it finally upgraded, thanks _j”: