That way all of the people who missed the news about Heroku and first heard about it when sites they were using stopped working would have a fighting chance to recover their data before it vanished.

Even better: Salesforce could have actually invested resources in Heroku (instead of effectively feature-freezing it a few years ago) such that the thing where the free tier acts as a major funnel for attracting paying customers continued to work, as it had for most of the lifetime of the service.