Kickbacks, of course, are quite different, where a company official has a legal duty to negotiate in good faith in the best interests of their company and not make purchasing decisions based on which vendor gives them the biggest personal cut of the deal. It's hard for me to see the other side of that, how anyone can possibly not understand that that is illegal.
This reminds me of the ridesharing debacle. Uber was operating an illegal taxi service which upset a lot of local governments. It was taken to the courts multiple times. Uber won but one of the lessons to young founders was to go for it even if it's not strictly legal - laws can change.
Now I'm not saying what Uber did was necessarily a bad thing. But if I had the idea to disrupt taxi services and learned about the legality of it all, I'd have moved on to the next idea.
What the hell is the lesson of any of this? It sure seems to be "doing unethical and/or illegal things is downright necessary to succeed big-time in business, and doing them successfully will make you rich and, most bizarrely, respected—unless you screw the wrong people (i.e. the bigger scammers/criminals/morally-questionable people) then you're just a criminal and we'll all sneer and spit on you and fine you and send you to prison"
It's less likely to pay off when the illegal things are instead unethical, unpopular, and harmful to the public, at least if you get caught—and when they involve betraying the people closest to you, you're probably going to get caught.
I think it's because a lot of "hustle" culture and stories of the early business careers of very successful founders involve a bunch of stuff that sure looks like fraud or otherwise like something that ought to be illegal (it may not be, but I mean that it feels like the kind of thing that ought to be illegal, to a normal person) that works out great for them and sure looks like it was a necessary step on their journey to hundreds of millions of dollars and being on the cover of TIME or whatever.
Add in normal corporate business practices just feeling gross as hell on a pretty regular basis, and I can kinda see why people might see this as not really that different from how you're "supposed to" do things—if you aren't a chump, anyway.
Kinda like the college admissions bribery scandal. There was a lot of "oh, so their crime was not being rich enough to bribe the correct way?" in people's reactions, because... well, the system's officially corrupt, in a lot of people's opinions, so prosecuting unofficial corruption feels more like a very fancy organized crime racket putting the screws to the (relatively) little guy to protect their own corruption, than good old feel-good justice.