According to a reddit thread they've saltwater hardened the fairings and now they can reuse them:

https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/bc8105/arabsat6a_el...

The first reuse mission seems to be an internal one though.

> in turn has a greater financial risk to the company

A financial risk you can count as R&D cost.

SpaceX has also positioned itself for some launches that would be acceptable to loose, like the deployment phase of starlink: loosing a few mass-produced satellites has to be much cheaper than loosing a big one-off satellite that takes months to rebuild.

I see multiple requests to ampproject on the official page, so Google is getting data regardless.

I think that is only an issue with hard to clean equipment, like engines.

Yea, I wish we'd get a more detailed explanation of the accounting on this. For all I knew it was totally plausible that fairings would be destroyed by sea water, and it was also plausible there'd be no damage. The part that confuses me is why they would spend so much effort trying to catch them with Mr. Steven if they are in fact serviceable after a swim. Maybe the idea is that salt-water refurbishment-and-reuse saves a bit of money compared to expendable, but mid-air-catch would have saved more but turned out to be too difficult?

Developing the recovery process has given them the chance to examine multiple fairings after they landed in the ocean. I'm sure they took the opportunity to see what refurbishing them would take, and perhaps that's what informed this decision.