It'd been extremely stupid to pivot all over the place if they had a plan to do what they do now all along.

The paywall is real. Also, a lot of quality developer oriented content is being associated with their domain, and they get to reap all the benefits.

Not a lot of incentive as a publication to continually hand that over to them.

I'm not denying it. Just that, when they started out, their response was telling: "How do you plan to run this 'awesome publishing platform' for free?" "Um ah we...ummm...magic? We'll see." I've seen that enough times to recognize digital sharecropping: first you work for free, then we monetize it for ourselves. Amazing that people dismissed that with "nah, they wouldn't dare. Why not? They're new, therefore not evil!" #wishfulThinking

TL;DR: "first dose is free"