The extreme cynicism really surprises me. The dude is here participating directly in the convo and giving super straight-forward answers! If that doesn't already seem like a good enough reason to be reasonable, then perhaps remember that you're talking to/about an actual human, not just a randomly generated text string

It's a person likely making $500k+/year for a two trillion dollar company. They absolutely could have waited, but this individual personally prioritized their year end goals over a feature that many things/people depend on.

Their participation in the thread complaining about it doesn't make it any less egregious.