Contrary to what Ledger is trying to sell, trusting a single company to "do the right thing" is not even remotely the same as having thousands of developers and hackers -- independent and contracted alike -- making sure that there's nothing fishy going on. It simply isn't.
I agree with you to some extent. However, I want to mention all those Dapps, decentralized liquidity providers, DEXs for ETH tokens and the likes that have been hacked or exit scammed numerous times in the past. Their open-source nature didn't prevent it. Nobody noticed the vulnerabilities until the money was gone. "Security experts" provided them with their seals of guarantee which proved to be useless after hackers found ways to breech the platforms. Just because there is a way to inspect a code doesn't mean those doing it put that much effort into it.
In my opinion, the intention (although I think it is not true that a large number of users asked for it) of enabling such a service only shows that Ledger does not care that they try to present risk as a benefit, as long as their additional profit is behind it.
Besides profiting even more, they are doing this as a sign they are willing to cooperate with certain governments, maybe even in collusion with them. We never understood why Wasabi would partner with a blockchain analysis company and why Trezor would do the same. We also won't understand this in its full context. Stricter regulations are coming, and governments are ensuring they have partners everywhere.
Look at where the companies that will be storing the shards are located. The USA and the UK + the last shard is held by Ledger. Don't you think they couldn't have found partner companies elsewhere? Of course, they could have. The way they did it now, the right document from the right 3-letter agency in the US gets US authorities one shard, with Ledger gladly supplying the second one.
If Ledger Recover was a mandatory service, then that would make sense but since its optional, there is no logical reason to produce another series of hardware wallets. You can either subscribe it and pay $9 monthly or just ignore it and use Ledger in a traditional way.
You are forgetting one thing. The code for Ledger Recover will become available on your device if you upgrade the firmware. For now, that's true only for the Nano X. You decide if you want to switch the feature on or off, but Ledger brings it to you no matter what. Imagine a self destruct button in your car, where, if you press it, the car explodes. I am not going to press it, but I am not comfortable having it there at all. Ledger has already decided to add that button.