Sounds like a rumour for now, but considering how poorly Sony has been handling backward compatibility in general, this makes perfect sense. I'm not happy and this makes me even less likely to purchase any PlayStation games digitally in the future. That said, I prefer physical anyway, and on PS4, there haven't really been many (if any) interesting deals anyway (at least for someone who's not subscribed to PS+).

Nooooooooo, all those PS1 and PS2 classics that I won't be able to easily purchase digitally instead of having to track down sometimes very hard to find and expensive physical copies (the PS3 store is where I got Suikonen II)

Nah this sucks. Period. There's still times where I want to go back to 360/PS3 games and buy DLC and play it, there's a lot of digital only games that haven't been ported to later systems and if you wish to go back to purchase said game in your preferred ecosystem (playstation in this case), you can't. Hopefully this is fake news or maybe Sony will reverse it.

Is it really that expensive to keep the store alive? I guess that's the future, I'll try to buy some games before they close the store.

I don't understand, you guys thought it would remain open forever?

It's not like books, CDs, films, physical games themselves, etc. are in print forever either. And bought copies of these will inevitably decay so the risk is just the same if not greater than the servers of a digital product shutting down.

It would eventually happen anyway.
Sony could easily create a PS3 emulator for PS5 but it seems this is very difficult, only kids in their basements with little money seem to be able to create such emulators.
Physical will always be my way to go, especially now in this era of cancel culture and cultural revolution. Nobody can take away your physical games/movies and you will always be able to play it the way it was released. For now.

Maybe this will make people think twice about buying those digital-only consoles.

Well. When the CMOS battery dies in PS4 and PS3 you can't access your digital or disc-based games. They need to connect to PS servers. PS3 CMOS batteries are at that point of dying. OG model PS4s are approaching the end of life of those batteries as well.

It’s 2021. If someone hasn’t bought a ps3, papa, or a vita game they wanted by now chances aren’t they weren’t actually planning on buying it at this point.

This is why backwards compatibility is important but of your console dies on you it’s possible to just buy a new one and log in there.