If there are 50 others who can fix my brakes, one of them will likely try to undercut your price so as to get my business.

In this case, M$ could have paid ten times that amount and it would still be pocket money both in terms of their ledger AND vs the damages the PR could cause alone.

M$ does have black market competitors that would have paid far more.

Doing the right thing morally is good. But when people see time and again that simply cashing out once could set you up for life.(Maybe not in this case but maybe in others.) That is an awfully tempting risk to take and I wouldn't blame them.

We're literally saying it doesn't pay to be moral.