They also spoke about it during the dev stream, again, making it clear that this is only the first step of a ongoing process to make pets viable.
Nonsensical only if you look at it from one perspective. They didn’t just make cats weaker, they reduced the range between pets to make all of them more evenly matched with each other.
The strongest were reduced and the weakest increased to meet in a middle ground. Since this is already planned as an ongoing process, it makes more sense to start at an average and buff from there rather than buff everything and nerf from there.