To be explicitly clear: I do not think he acted with any malice or attempt to get press. I think it's a situation where other people at Wrong Organ tried a little marketing tactic that broke TOS, got their wrist slapped, and decided it wasn't worth informing their music guy of something kind of embarrassing. Especially given it happened when Mouthwashing was very much a critical darling and making plenty of sales on Steam.
Would you messaged every individual person you worked with on an indie game (that's doing great sales-wise) to inform them you broke the TOS and got the game de-listed on itch, or would you just let it slide? It's completely unrelated to what they did on the game, and it's one less person who has to know you got in the tiniest bit of trouble.
This looks to be more of a situation where journalists, who are used to small game devs where one person has TONS of roles in the company, did not slow down long enough to message other people at Wrong Organ to confirm the music guy has all the relevant details and not just... an employee who has literally not looked at Wrong Organ's itch account until yesterday. They also didn't take five seconds to plug Mouthwashing's itch link into the Wayback machine and see it's been delisted all of 2025, which immediately pokes holes in the original guy's announcement.
We're at a point where reporters HAVE to be the first to report on something if they wanna justify their income, but that comes with the downside of not having time to wait for replies to emails or doing basic due diligence legwork.
To GameSpot's credit, they immediately edited their version of the story with an update and new headline as soon as they found out.