Dear @minimaxr, I can only comment as per my knowledge & experience… To apply for the citizenship one needs to show his/her 5 years of residency and that is done via the Certidão de Contagem do Tempo that used to be taken from SEF (today’s AIMA).
The key question is the start day of that period, in the past it was more or less in sync with the issuance date of the first card - or it could be a week before the issuance date as it happened in my case. I can see that with the new change they will redefine the date that will be used as the starting date - which is great news for many… As with many changes, most probably they will also need to clarify few questions such as if one would need to spend corresponding time in Portugal later on… E.g. if you waited for 2 years after your initial application to get the card, do you later have to spend the corresponding 2 weeks as well in Portugal or are those two years just added to your “contagem de tempo” without any condition… I think the latter might be the case, as this change seems to be introduced to compensate for the process times that seems to get ever and ever longer.
In my mind even a year is way too much to process an application in post Covid times when things are happening online across the world. Yes there is the backlog but we know from D7 visas that if wanted things can progress very quickly.