Yes. That's literally the explanation. Motorola wanted to move people to their 88k RISC CPU. Apple was planning to move the Mac to 88k; the 68k emulator on the first PowerMacs was originally for the 88k.
We had 88K nuBus cards for our Macs. I was digging into 88K runtime architecture and toolchains to support it.
Without warning, one fine day we were instructed to immediately remove the cards and return them to managers. No explanations. It was the steepest edge to "this project is getting canceled" I've experienced.
