Are they to be compensated? Appears so.

A related topic might be all the people suffering the same theft while working for much smaller players.

From there, it moves pretty rapidly to, "get rid of tips and pay a wage that funds people existing reasonably and showing up for work" rather than start a fairly expensive and difficult enforcement effort.

Maybe the idea of just avoiding all this mess to prevent what did happen, and what is happening to a ton of people is popular because it is relevant?