i don't want to make claims about the particular case, but im worried if you infer a heuristic and apply it elsewhere it could fail

I think Nonlinear should be assigning enough credence to the possibility that they extremely harmed their employees with a degree of horror and remorse. Not laughter or dismissal.

Sometimes scrupulous/doormat people bend over backwards to twist the facts into some form to make an accuser reasonable or have a point. If you've done this, maybe eventually you talked to outside observers or noticed a set of three lies that you had previously been charitable about-- and you're like "hey wait a minute, I totally regret dwelling on feeling bad about this".

I talked about this with a friend who updated me toward thinking that the scrupulous doormat people are a small enough proportion of the population (or at least certainly they grow out of it) that this is true but a rounding error.

I've done this a few times, and I'd like to advocate for people of scrupulous doormat tendencies to have space to not be eternally signaling that they did due diligence before concluding that they dont have deep regrets or behavioral updates to do every time it comes up. People should feel allowed to express themselves aligned with very reasonable needs for catharsis or to reclaim their map of reality. Sometimes this will look like dismissiveness (especially if theyre still bitter about concessions having been extracted).

So if we were applying my point to this case (which, to be clear, we're not), it would look like "we were horrified and remorseful, went through and did an audit, when we concluded that everything was fine all along we ended up pretty annoyed that we were pressured into doing this unpleasant timesink audit process, and are trying to laugh it off now"--- I don't think it's necessarily a signal if they don't prioritize conveying that this process had occurred to you in particular.

(Again re the rounding error thing: very few cases are sufficiently black and white for this comment to apply).