It's probably worse for them if customers cancel, because customers are unlikely to resubscribe to netflix having cancelled versus trying a competitor streaming service. Better psychologically to have an inactive account than to lose an account.

(Also netflix would have to report all those unsubscribes to shareholders, but this way no one cancels and they're framing it positively as consumer-friendly).

So if netflix incentives people to people keep their accounts, they remove the friction from what would otherwise be a high-friction resubscribe.

As long as netflix believes they can get people to come back for an occasional exclusive content hit-show, then they can reactivate the payments for a while.