This is a major downgrade to MR Plat benefits. In many hotels, a one category upgrade is almost nothing. Depending on the property, it can be the same room one floor higher or a room of the same size but a different shape, etc. It also limits the required upgrade to cases where the hotel has an empty room exactly one category up and the probability of this can be small if that category contains few rooms.

In fact, one could even envision a hotel redefining room categories to have, for example, many standard rooms but only a handful in the next category, so that they rarely if ever have to give an upgrade.