Humans made the decision. Some humans like doing what they think is the right thing, otherwise they feel terrible. Feeling like a good human and not a bad one drives a decent amount of decision making.
I would err on the side that this benefits Stripe somehow. Corporate entities don't "do the right thing because it's the right thing to do". They do the right thing because it's strategically advantageous to them.
Cynically, if they let the RSUs expire it would make it hard to hire people at competitive rates relative to FAANG compensation because the RSUs promised would have been shown to be worth zero, and the total promised compensation would then also have to have any equity marked down to zero.
I know there are bad corporations out there but if you work for a corporation that "don't do the right thing because it's the right thing to do", I'm sorry. Sounds abusive. It sucks to have been treated so poorly that you're that suspicious that doing the right thing has to have some ulterior motive and it can't just be because it's the right thing to do.
Your first sentence is likely the conversation that was had. The only thing I'm suspicious of is people claiming corporate benevolence, which is the way I read danielmarkbuce's comments. Corporations, for better or for worse, will always bias towards pragmatism. When you have distributed and varying levels of complicated power that's just how things shake out. There's no soul or real culture at the center of a corporation.
The cofounders also care about their reputation very much
Their reputation has literally had monetary impact on Stripe by bringing in talent more easily because people “like” the cofounders, and it also has turned the company into the default payment platform for many startups.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they had a professional PR consultancy for boosting their individual images
Retaining that rep and goodwill is probably literally considered worth a couple billion to Stripe
It’s instead become an opportunity for investors to buy lots of Stripe equity (which the cofounders are usually very stingy with—see the percentage of the company they sold during past rounds) at potentially very cheap prices since the sellers don’t get to set the price!
Stripe’s incentive to keep the price high is that it becomes the price point that employees would expect future stock vests to be awarded at. Not sure how strong an incentive that is exactly though
Whether a human made it is pretty arbitrary. Someone came up with a strategy and multiple levels of Stripe decision making thought it was doable and a good idea. Executives, more often than not, will put share holders and company interest first.