These were probably just very low viewership while being very culturally relevant. People care that they’re gone but not so much that they’d actually watch.
The deep weird, interesting part of this negotiation is that it is happening "inside the same house": the incoming new management of HBO Max coming from Discovery have made it clear they are looking to cut a lot of costs and care a lot more about that than the value of the content they are cutting, while presumably the old guard still left at Warner Brothers are negotiating for the value of their more expensive to produce (compared to Discovery's niches) content.
From the outside we don't have a lot of details of these negotiations, including whether or not this was highly viewed content on HBO Max. We just see Warner Brothers Discovery punching themselves in infighting, and it is very odd and kind of interesting from this distance.
People will pay to have content available even though they have no time to actually watch it.
At a previous analytics job we were working for our client, one of the larger streaming platforms as were trying to quantify value, and more importantly attribution.
Attribution was huge and was still being worked out by the data scientists and then re-worked by marketing C-Levels at the platform. By the time I left, If you signed up for the service and immediately watched "Big Movie" as your first watch, or you finished >50% of "Big Movie" within the first of signup then "Big Movie" was the attributed thing that got you in.
This helped drive decisions (or helped "justify" in retrospect) for day-and-date movies (play on the platform + in theaters same-day), or to take what would have been a theatrical and put it only on streaming.