It doesn’t exactly take brilliant insight to see that this is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, and so them taking this justification to avoid porting (and I think you’re probably correct that this is their reasoning) creates quite a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I think Factorio's code quality allows the developers to make the ports relatively cheap.
Big studios have so many developers that come and go and just work on legacy code that seems to make assumptions about the platform on every level. The cost becomes too high and not worth it.
It's because one is greedy, but because it's bloated.
If I remember correctly the studio behind Mini Metro gave up Linux on their new game because it was too time consuming to run the game and test it. Obviously if you lack tests and need to have manual testers all the time, new platforms won't help you. (I'm making assumptions from the blog posts I read, I might be wrong about the real reasons.)