It wasn't planned to just be given to them. It was always a prototype sent to them for sponsoring purposes. Then they dunked on it without seeing its intended purpose and auctioned it. And until this thing blew up they never refunded it despite email chains. If it was a misunderstanding it was an egregious misunderstanding. Though they also enormously misunderstood a mouse in another tech review and never took off the cover while complaining of trash tracking (because they didn't take off the cover at the bottom!), that being just one of the more ridiculous errors two years ago. This all exploded around the same time as the employee's sexual harassment allegations so you might've missed it. Just watch Gamers Nexus's video on this for the receipts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGW3TPytTjc it's not an hour long! C'mon, spend your time there instead of heated back-and-forth. Or this 30-minute video from a commentary channel I haven't watched yet but the channel has a good rep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCvvmvIjNWM

That said, this was all two years ago. Not sure what stirred things up in January.