There's actually a discussion to be had here, but it's being clouded by jumping to unsubstantiated conclusions (which is what's prompting the backlash).
The surface-level answer of "Why are the contestants being given hand microphones?" is "Because of the staging." In about 90% of the deals, the contestants are standing on their own ovals while Wayne is standing on the logo at center stage with a shin-high wall separating him from the traders. He is out of arm's length of the contestants. He can't reach them with his microphone without some awkward stretching. (The remainder of the time -- in deals with three contestants and the Big Deal at the end -- Wayne shares the center-stage space with a contestant, but they always stand in separate halves of the big oval, still more than arm's length away.)
Why are the contestants now being given hand microphones this season when in prior seasons with the same staging, they wore lavalier microphones? Because this season, more people were added to the audience, and it's no longer practical to place lavalier microphones on all of the potential traders.*
The question becomes why, even though more people have been added to the audience, the show is still implementing staging procedures inspired by the prior seasons' COVID restrictions. (You'll note that contestants still aren't handed money and that Jonathan is still using the reacher/grabber to return dice to the contestant in dice-rolling games.) The best that fans can do for that question is speculate.
*Last season demonstrated the limit of how many lavalier microphones the show was willing to use. You could see that in each "pod," usually only one of the audience members was wearing a microphone -- the audience member who had a chance of being selected as a contestant. The other person(s) in the pod was/were effectively there for support. Once in a while, Wayne would invite the other person down to join the contestant, at which point they would be given a hand microphone so they could be heard.
