I think that having the reveal early February is compatible with these guys not receiving the mail. Maybe Sony didn't invite them because they plan to make the event elsewhere (like in Japan, their home country, or Europe, their biggest market) or that it may be a State Of Play / Nintendo direct like video.
Or who knows, maybe they make a streamed event from USA with some attendees but this time when making that VIP list they focused more on partners like big game publishers, big retailers or people from services like Netflix, Spotify or Disney+ than people from gaming media and so on.
It would make sense to make its reveal before GDC (March), in order to announce at GDC dev related stuff like UE and Unity working on PS5 taking advantage of RT stuff, some extra tech specs of the console, maybe to announce some new controller features that may interest the devs like haptic feedback stuff, maybe enhaced motion detection for VR, etc.