There's been a discussion in DHF forum in mattermost for weeks about potentially temporarily unvoting proposals due to high price of HBD. But it wasn't until today that HBD jumped suddenly. A weekly advisory basis isn't really possible as long as HBD price is so volatile. I certainly had no idea it would spike to $3 today.
From what I can see the option to reduce the pay is worse for proposals. As it is, they temporarily lose funding, but will be able to go back to full funding after they are voted back in.
If they lower their funding, and HBD went back to $1, I don't think they can raise the funding level back and would need to create and campaign for entirely new proposals to reach the same funding level. So I don't think that mechanism is that useful for the situation of fluctuating HBD. I believe it was mainly added as a method for bargaining between proposers and voters.
Another potential option would be for proposers to just temporarily redirect their funds to the hdbstabilizer, but some might not feel comfortable doing so, because they might feel they were overstepping the guidelines of their original proposal, unless they had put in such a clause when they originally made their proposal.
From the available options, it looked to me like a temporary unvote was the most reasonable choice.