Or, alternatively, that they felt Standard was at the point where it needs an awful last resort nuclear option.

I haven't played much standard in a while, but what I read about the format has just been consistently negative for several seasons now. Good or ill, Wizards absolutely reacts to major player-base unhappiness. Unhappiness about the crashing value of reprinted cards gave us the Reserved List. Unhappiness about "Combo Winter" gave us the only "emergency ban" in the game's history when they didn't want yet another round of oppressive combo decks in Standard. Unhappiness about the 4-block Extended format led to the abandonment of the format in favor of a new, non-rotating one. Unhappiness about the new Standard rotation policy led them to revert back to once-yearly rotations suddenly and out of the blue.

It wouldn't be at all out of character for Wizards to have noted player unhappiness over several Standard formats and decided that if the next one looked like it was going to go similarly they'd try to nip it in the bud with multiple bans. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's an indication that they're now feeling more liberal with banning as an option. Could just be that they felt it was a necessary move to try to give Standard a prod.

After all, the recent Modern bannings have been done with a much lighter hand than older ones. The bans of Twin and Pod killed multiple archetypes. But the Eldrazi decks were handled by a ban that clearly left them in a very workable situation (and Tron lived through that ban as well), the GGT re-banning clearly didn't kill Dredge, and the Probe banning hurt but clearly didn't kill Infect (or Storm or any other of the fringe decks that utilized it).