Jobs was absolutely ruthless and would do anything for his goals.
This isn't about "poaching" employees (in our society people can work where they choose, they are not property of a feudal lord) and using their knowledge.
This is about ex-employees accessing Apple's internal fileshares. It's about instructing employees who were about to leave to take everything they could with them, and giving them training on how to evade Apple's offboarding security process.
The best corporations I worked at had people dedicated to reverse engineering competitor products and were deeply steeped in the market, the worst were those where product just cared about making their bosses happy.