When you're under a lot of stress, your internal evaluation function for what is moral can start to break down. It may have been hard for him to turn the money down, especially if he's addicted to the sense of power he's getting from his coding agent spend. As he said, his wife suggested they can't afford it.
There's another thing. A certain type of engineer seems to get sucked into Amazon's pressure culture. They either are, or end up, a bit manic. Laid back and relaxed one day (especially after holidays), but wound up and under a lot of internal pressure to produce the next, and a lot more of the latter. Something like Gas Town must be a crazy fix when you're feeling that pain. Combined with the vision that if you don't, you're unemployed/unemployable in 12 to 24 months, you might feel you have no choice but to spend every waking minute at it.
It's a bit (more than a bit) rude to analyse someone at a distance. And to be honest, I think something like Gas Town is probably one of the possible shapes of things to come. I don't think what I can observe looks super healthy, is all.