Wallets usually belong to real people with lives. We can empathize with them. Companies are not people. And they also don't and can't empathize with you.
The law doesn't say companies MUST choose the most profitable choice at every turn, and even explicitly allows for good treatment of customers, community, employees etc as a viable business strategy (even if it's sad that it must be justified in that way).
Now how those humans that run the company behave is another thing - they are free to be greedy assholes, and a lot of them are, and some of them aren't - but that's still a human thing.
Yes, they are not humans. They are not even living creatures. They are mostly-legal entities mostly for the purpose of contracting with humans or other legal entities.
> they are run by humans, who do feel, empathize, and are living beings
This is usually true, but it is orthogonal to whether the company (a legal entity) itself is a biologically living creature, which is the only thing capable of feeling*. To put a point on it: my lawnmower is also run by humans, but it does not have empathy for any grass or people that gets in its way. It mostly just goes where it is steered. A company is like that, except with less touching grass.
* — unless you want to argue semantics about what "feeling" means, even though the discussion is about "feeling" and "empathy" in the way humans experience it, and how that form of "empathy" does not exist for a nonliving legal entity which may or may not employ any actual humans
Or...to warn people away from ever expecting compassionate or empathetic behaviour from companies, and remind people not to trust them?
I trust a business to fulfill their obligations as stated in writing for the money paid. I do not trust them in any other way. Nobody should "trust" or depend on undefined behavior. Common sense can only ever be as common as you expect.
I never gave one? For what it's worth, I agree with your second paragraph, despite your first being needlessly aggressive.
As for companies being shit, that's just capitalism, but plenty of people believe that's the only way.
So does data ? it belongs to real people.
I would imagine baseten's customers and eventually their end-users[1] were also grateful that their data was not compromised here and the disclosure was responsible.
[1] There is a pretty good chance you and I could be using services who are using baseten