They were referencing the fact that the other properties of wotc - the ones that they had creative control over - were mismanaged to the point of public outcry for both internal operations and things like the vistani racism in curse of strahd. They removed the word exotic from tomb of annihilation because it is indicative of euro centric colonialism. With a crisis across multiple products, Weiss et al were claiming that due to their other racist, sexist, colonialist, etc... products that they nixed the deal in case their books might cause more trouble. You can't control authors, so you cancel the deal. You can approve or deny changes to a product that you are licensing out to a third party. Larian, picking up a book from 4 months ago, would have alignment in the game. This is a creative control issue that needs to be addressed as it was part of the reason they had an issue in the first place with "evil"/dark skin drow and "dumb" orcs.
So there's definitely an element of it in there. To what extent, who knows, but so far I've seen all the damage control things wotc did recently in the game DNA.
I don't really care, I just decided to add information for some reason lol.
