Each tool can be used for good and for evil: risk management is primarily used to hedge against the risk of a contingent, uncertain loss, and is embedded by the law for companies, and people too.
It certainly sucks, but your summary of the US legal system is irrelevant.
Spin it however you like, but the fact is that he was denied entry into the US?
Whether or not he can pay (time, money) to go in the future is irrelevant to being denied today?
Regarding the entire esta vs visas... I'm lucky enough to have passed painlessly through VISA and I don't understand the difference between them? You have to apply for both? You have to provide your identity documents, information about yourself, payment? The only difference I can see is that you don't need to visit an embassy? Why do we draw a distinction, other than marketing?
Having been a great admirer of the US, I can say that what I admire are some principles, principles that seem forgotten. They are probably forgotten because when you teach a CBP employee to look for only the worst of people, this will eventually find something suspicious in anyone.
The recent run into exploiting software vulnerabilities could explain why there’s a focus on developers/hackers. But just putting a critique is not constructive, remembering where we come from, what are our principles, why we have them, and their purpose, is much better to motivate why it's wrong to "discriminate" someone.
It's not just slow and annoying, it's wrong because he’s not responsible.
And no that does not have anything to do with ejecting Microsoft from the US. Microsoft isn't a private foreign individual using a privileged entry mechanism in the US that given any reason whatsoever can be revoked in favour of a perfectly functional visa process that most countries have to use.
ESTA is only available to a few countries, and not all people in those countries.
I don't think Microsoft will be ejected from the US because of an ESTA invalidation.