The contrast between "Calvin and Hobbes was threatened with widespread cancellation." and "only fifteen of the 1,800 papers running Watterson’s strip threatened" is quite stark.
If you are running a paper and are already under stress and trying to streamline operations and now some cartoonist demands you use a format that requires significant extra work, you'd probably complain too, even threaten to drop that content. Threats are free, and they might work, especially if a lot of papers made similar complaints and threats.
But, when it came right down to the actual decision, knowing how many readers really love that particular artwork, and would even cancel their subscriptions if it were absent from your paper, and the math told you those losses would exceed the costs you were trying to avoid, so you'd find the papers collectively lost the conflict, and you'd keep it, do the extra work, and keep the subscribers.
Thinking about it for a minute, it seems unsurprising the difference between the initial cost-free bluster vs the final whimper of a handful of costly cancellations would be quite stark?
My comment was not about what happened, which does not need to be justified, in my opinion, especially at this late date.
My comment was about the contrast between "widespread" and the actual number that threatened, which was immediately stated to be 15/1800. The actual number that canceled was even smaller, but the characterization of one one-hundred-twentieth as "widespread" was interesting.
Yup, but I'd bet the number who complained approached 1800 and the number of complaints that verbally threatened, or alluded to "having to reconsider whether we run it" vs making a specific written threat was much higher. And yes, they could have been more clear about it.