I can't speak for Retool, of course, but it was pitched to me by my fabulous editor there as the company wanting to show the great visual editing tools of the past and make sure they weren't forgotten. They had already run a wildly fascinating story about Visual Basic, something I never thought I would be interested in, and it was riveting. There was no marketing involvement in the story at all. There's an interesting line where producing compelling editorial work shines a nice light on what you're doing as a company? Stripe published Increment for years, both online and in a very lovely print edition, and I wrote (for the same editor) for years for them until that no longer served Stripe's particular purpose for it. But it was all essentially independent editorial with nothing to do with Stripe's core mission.
On the production side, I didn't see much of how it would look until it went live, and I think it tells an incredibly robust story—it's a great parallel to my reporting in a way that I've rarely seen in my whole career?!