You're making the same mistake Hotpink did, which is thinking SG is some random "fledgling studio". There's plenty of aspects to compare, but start with their Patreon accounts. Hotpint currently has almost 700 patrons that they gathered for the past 3-4 years. SG now already has more than 800 patrons that grew in just a month.
Sure, HP could've done better for themselves if they didn't act harshly. But how HP behaved is who they are, there's no changing that. HP knows the potential of SG in the "tentacle locker" competition. So they got greedy and tried to absorb them and get an easy cash cow.
You're basically just throwing random stuff now here. LL is "the smaller project"? "Shut down Strange Girl studio entirely"? "exceptionally easy"? Their growth tells everything. "I can't stress enough how effortless it would have been to do that if they actually wanted to." Lol, just look at their itch complaint report, it's not effortless. It's more like desperate.