Unless the implication is that the author of this point is misrepresenting things, I'm struggling to think of what "very good reason" there could be when there's a clear record of someone reporting a bug well before it's fixed. At best, it seems like typical slow bureaucracy, which I don't think is a particularly good reason. There's no reason it should take over a year for someone to approve something like this if the company actually incentivized it. Your logic might be sound, but it's hard for me to look at a situation like this and think "company is either stingy or overly bureaucratic like companies overwhelmingly tend to be in almost every other circumstance" is less likely than "company has legitimate reason not to pay out a bounty that ostensibly has been fulfilled". It just seems way more plausible that the incentives that happen pretty much everywhere else have bled into this domain, assuming the author is accurately describing the events.