Yes, the email service is horrible. That’s why new account creation is banned now. Don’t waste your time on that service anymore. We know it’s broken and won’t fix it.
The only thing that was purposely changed in the email service is that the creation of new email accounts (regardless of when the hosting account was created or whether it has other email accounts already) is disabled.
Email accounts which were created before this change still “work”. Or at least work as well as they used to. Which is to say, not particularly well.