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> they paid almost none of the fines.

Source?

So far they’ve paid something like €20 million out of €4.0 billion in GDPR fines.

Most of the fines (and all of the big ones) are simply "pending appeal".

The justice system is slow, that's why the fines are slow to be collected, that's all.

As if they'd end up paying?

They paid all the fines that were confirmed after appeal, you can look at the linked table yourself.