Can't feel bad for companies since they started this with their targeted advertising campaigns in which they took sides in social and political issues to gain favor with certain customer demographics. Now that the precedent has been set, they're being pushed and pulled in every direction as a consequence. They're reaping what they sowed.

Companies have done this since companies were a thing. Consumption is always political, always social.

A neutral political stance would be to do nothing and ignore the "incident".

Blizzard took explicit action and chose a side.

That’s pretty much my point (although there would have been more than 1 neutral way of dealing with this). Countless companies have jumped aboard taking a side on divisive political issues, and excluding out-group members as much as possible. The fact they are happy to do this when it’s marketable, but don’t want any part of the practice when it actually puts the bottom line at risk just shows how insincere it all was to begin with.

None of this would have ever been a problem if there wasn’t an enormous political movement to force these politics into every corner of society. Now you simply have a situation where a lot of the same people who were proponents of this practice are unhappy, simply because they’ve found themselves in the out-group.

If you’re running a business there are certain things you don’t say to your customers despite being your right of free speech to say so. Alternatively, you can say whatever you like and lose those customer.

As much as I'm against combining work life and political life, I think there's a chasm of difference between taking a stance against someone who tweets things you don't like and a government who is engaged in ethnic cleansing.

Politics aside, just doing business in China and the security sacrifices made to do so is, to me, an outsized business risk and a risk that I wish my company would not take. I'm sure many others feel the same. The short term profits aren't worth the long term repercussions. My employer doesn't agree, but I still want to go on record with them saying so.

This is the correct interpretation of this issue.

All of a sudden, millions of people who are quite happy to be fence-sitters about all sorts of injustices across the world (Many of them in their own countries) have decided to draw the line on China and Hong Kong.

According to them, anyone who does not explicitly support pro-HK politics is an enemy, and must be punished accordingly. (Even if what they want is a no politics policy.)

This is, of course, the same sort of 'with us or against us' behaviour, that those same fence-sitters criticized when it came to other injustices...