No, the sale of copy writed merchandise was never allowed. There is a bit of a grey area with what they call transformative works.
Building on what @gonzosgirrl said, I was in the merch room, and I was looking at pins and asked if they had Dean ones, and was told to come back the next day because apparently after creation did its walk through they would mix a few of the Dean pins in with rest.
They aren't banning the sale of Winchester merch, they are banning unlicensed sellers from selling licensed stuff. If you have a license, like Conquest journals there, they are free to sell however much they like.
With the take over, its possible Discovery is a lot stricter on that stuff.e.
SPN stuff isn't okay if they don't have permission. IIRC, the rules say the stuff vendors can't sell trademarked. They specifically mentioned the new things because its part of a new show. It suddenly doesn't change for other licensed trademarked stuff.
I honestly don't get why this is such a major sticking point for some many people. Its not like the mothership didn't twist Mary's history into a pretzel already. At first she hated hunting and wanted out, than not so much as he left her husband and young son to go hunt, and acted like her sons were some kind of burden.
John was supposed to be in love with Mary so much his whole world imploded when she died, than not so much, they hated each other and cupids arrow brought them together. Suddenly the whole reason for the show existing in the first place no longer existed.
It was just really about making sure Sam and Dean were being born, except wait no it wasn't it was just God being bored and writing some lousy fan fiction and the story never existed, If people adhere strictly to show canon, then the mother ship never started until the end 15.19. Sam and Dean really only had free will for one episode. So that means the series if basically one episode long and Dean dies on their first hunt, and Sam leaves for parts unknown and lives a lonely life.
Not exactly a great legacy for our "heroes" in canon. I mean they didn't save anyone. God just wrote it that way. First time they did it on their own was a disaster.
Canon sucked toward the end of the show. If Jensen can fix that. I say more power to him.
What about the mother ship would actually change if John knew all along? "I went to Missouri and learned the truth' could really apply to more than one thing. It could be learning about the demon deal Mary made, then John would still start hunting after Mary died. He's still become obsessed with the thing that killed her. He'd still keep Sam and Dean in the dark. The only WTF moment it would create is in The Song Remain the Same where John found out and had his memory erased.
Which makes it canon that that John knew before hand. So its really not as against canon as some comments make it out to be as it already happened. Its a show about the Supernatural, time travel, angels, memory wipes and AU's It's really doesn't matter when or how John knew because there are multiple options to bring it full circle, and even if this don't, nothing would really change.