The angle is presumably that links to news articles don't actually generate significant value (whether revenue or "relevance") for Meta; it just creates massive amounts of free traffic for the media companies.

Paying for something that generates no value is a bad deal. Why is it surprising that they're not planning on doing that?

I'm sure they've run A/B tests on this in other places, and have a good idea on just how unimportant news articles are to them. If it turns out that California is different, and users and advertisers start leaving in droves, it'll be easy enough for them to reverse course.