This is an intended change designed to help boost income for sites using free trials. A lot of users will provide a credit card when offered a free trial, and then allow their subscription to continue without cancelling it, but may never come back to provide their credit card if not required to up front. It's a pretty common sales tactic.
Ultimately, as mentioned, this is intended, but I could see a desire for a setting perhaps to control the behavior. Either way, I'm not sure this is really an ideal topic for the development gateway forum here. Would you like me to move this to the feedback forum instead?