Presumably someone from marketing said "we should make our phones more repairable than the competition" and after the program was announced someone from finance said "making phones repairable is too expensive and selling parts isn't making us money"

Pretend what? Samsung already had the parts infrastructure. They added another parts customer who had less to offer them in return.

I looked back at the partnership announcements, and that's really all Samsung was offering: parts and repair guides. It also happened at a time when right to repair was proving pretty popular so there's the obvious PR aspect to it.

The iFixit post just makes it sound like Samsung wasn't interested in subsidizing their repair parts, and their construction methods haven't changed much in 2 years.