Having read this thread and watched a few YouTube videos to confirm it, yeah I cancelled my eBay order (only placed this morning). Yes that's true. No doubt they'll have a nice new range of models to go along with it too, sadly!
Yeah, I have a couple of Lightning-based uSD card readers that I use with their apps on my 10.5 Pro. They work quite well - more than I can say about Files & external storage. I wish I had similar USB-C readers for my 12.9 Pro that worked as well - the real issue for me is that Apple still hasn't figured out how to deal with the exFAT format.