Admittedly I don't have any experience with this sort of thing, but I have always read it as; Microsoft want his work, they should have just paid him X million for it, or paid him to keep working on it.

Instead, they made it into some sort of interview, got all of his input then went off and copy-paste'd the code (an exaggeration) into WinGet and ghosted him.

To add insult to injury he got a nice little "fuck you" the day before they released it.