Well, there was that incident with TloU2 where they announced a Feb release, only 1 month later to delay the game another 3 or 4 months (and it got delayed again after if I'm not mistaken).

I honestly don't think there's any reason to suggest they had the date finalised for the SOP but decided to not announce it. 

Even Yotei's release date was in a blog post. 

I honestly can't believe they had no date, decided the date, and to announce it in about 10 days after the SoP.

One thing I can also see is Sony having internally confirmed the release for GTA 6 with Rockstar, and it'll indeed release in the announced date, so they had no way to push Wolverine closer to the holidays anymore as they will need to give it some release room before GTA 6 hits, as the 2 months before it they announced.

So they probably had planned a mid to late October release date if GTA 6 got delayed.

I can't rule out it being decided to appease some of the backslash tho, even Digital Foundry was being quite harsh on their decision to close Bluepoint, and even Playstation focused channels like Mystic which is really cool headed and brings a lot of down to earth positivity to the Playstation community was contemplating if Hermen Hulst should step away like Jim Ryan in his last video. I can only imagine the reactions of the overall community.

It was REALLY bad for their image, as I think it should have been. And they were hiding in such a good mood after the SoP...

I think this is somewhat hyperbolic. Those who actually care about the Bluepoint situation are enthusiasts like you and myself. it's no different from the Japan Studio closing. The vast majority of the PS5 userbase don't care or don't even know. And I would imagine that most of the potential +10 million users for Wolverine are the same.

So, I'm not really sure how this actually helps Sony because either ppl don't care (then the deflection is pointless), or the ppl who do won't be swayed from negativity (which means the deflection is pointless).