I don’t see it as a bad thing as “a normal user” on the platform. Believe it or not. Sometimes I feel that we only look at things as botters, automators or blackhatters. The world is much bigger than that. On a personal level I have experience 2 of my friends, whos children were developing depression, because they were bullied on IG and because they barely got any likes on their photos. The cruel reality is, that IG is damn hyped, and among youngsters and specially kids and teenagers, it does matter mentaly to get likes and comments. They check every single comment and like they get!
On the other hand you then have all people on insta who are not so called influencers and wanna be famous. Alot of people are using the platform to stay intouch with friends and realtives, and as @Alexnvo mentions, they do ordinary stuff on the app and don’t hunt likes and comments. So to them it means nothing that the likes are removed. By removing the likes FB kills two birds with one stone. You are protecting youngsters and you have people who do not give a damn about likes which cover 80% of the platform. And then for the rest 20% the likes given to their posts are still visible to the account holder. They are still able to see who liked their post and who didn’t. It just not publicly available.
And it is ignorant to think that FB will make any move which will hurt the biggest active socialmedia platform atm. Surely they have experts worked on this and turned every penny 20 times before any decisions were made. This solution will benefit their needs.
By fighting automation as they do right now, forces influencers and others who make a living on the platform to use ads to have a greater reach. And still even if they choose automation, there is plenty of tools out there for companies to gather needed meta data on each profile.
Brands and companies don’t care how many likes and comments are visible directly on your profile, they want your genuine reach. That is what they pay you for.
At the end FB did exactly what they did promise before june '19
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No like hides from igblade.com. You guys will still be able to check like the like count for each post there 
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I was looking at the 'gram and I don’t even like likes. #Yeezy
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