It's a corporate, acting in the typical corporate way.
Any forum run by a company for the company's implicit benefit should be assumed to have a business owner who will, at some point, need to justify its existence whether as a vehicle for support, customer advocacy and/or community outreach.
Companies do not do this sort of thing out of the goodness of their heart. Some of the more laid-back ones might be on the fence but even then they're still going to weigh up the costs of licences, hosting and time cost of moderation against whatever benefits they feel exist (imagined or otherwise)
I think the most unicorn example I have is one forum I'm on. There is a company that sells a product. They also run a blog that is... very tangentially related to their product, but the blog has enough traffic on its own to sustain advertising income, not to mention feed an amount of traffic to the originating company and its product. The blog also has a forum but it has always been a digital hellscape of some level (there is no advertising in the forum whatsoever, and the least-worst eras of the forum could be described as a digital jungle, it used to be much, much worse).
Some people come for the blog and that's it. Some came for the blog, found the forum and eventually joined (much as I did). Some... came for the blog, stayed for the forum and ignored the blog sufficiently that the blog not being real is now a forum meme because the blog consumers and the forum residents have a less than perfect overlap now.
The company bears the hosting cost, the licence is free, and the forumites themselves moderate for the most part - and there's enough perception that the forum generates traffic for the blog (and thus advertising and revenue) that the forum remains as-is, despite the fact that by all normal metrics it shouldn't exist.