What's the true benefit of announcing anything before Epic opens though? Right now, it's full steam ahead on promoting three new hotels and a brand new park. You don't want to draw away from that and anything HHN related would just muddy the promotional waters. Right now, they seem more worried about trickling out things like "Wands 2.0", "Epic Universe food!", "Details about Helios", etc.
Once June hits, Epic should be more in "advertisement" territory than "announcement posts/blogs" territory allowing them a window to start rolling out HHN and mixing that into the mix (possibly with packages like you mentioned).
Also, like you mentioned, even with a more "muted" announcement season, 2022 and 2023 had massive crowds. It didn't tend to impact things in an overwhelmingly negative manner. Nights sold out, FFP sold out for the first time ever, etc. It's far more important to push the new park that they just spent a buttload of money on that isn't yet a familiar destination/event/brand like Halloween Horror Nights is.
Lastly, it's not like it would even be a big dramatic delay to wait until Epic opens to push HHN. Last year, the first house announcement was May 17th. Epic opens May 22nd. They could easily follow last year's release structure if they just cut the June 27th - July 11th and July 25th-August 7th gaps that slowed the rollout down.