They've been slowly moving the time lower and lower. It will go lower than 45 days in the future, but the reason why we don't go immediately to 1 hour is that it would be too much of a shock.

>So every small site that took the LE bait needs expensive help to stay online.

It's all automated. They don't need help to stay online.

re too much shock, how so?

Nope. I renew my LE certs manually. I take my http server down, run certbot, and pull http back online