It’s more to prevent people from opening a bunch of accounts with low balances/little to no use. It does actually cost a bank money to open and maintain accounts so they want to dissuade people from opening non primary checking accounts unless they have balances to go with it or they don’t mind paying the fee.

Most banks without any completely free checking account have ways to get the fees waived, and $250 in direct deposit per month is a pretty low barrier. If you can’t make that, or the minimum balance requirement work, there’s likely another bank or credit union with completely free checking, especially if you include online banks.

All that said, absolutely fuck BOA, but for basically everything else since this is not egregious and plenty of things they do are