Startups fail. Fact of life. We talk about "burn rate" and "runway" because it is easier to say than "The number of days you have to find a working business model or secure additional investment, after which you have to fire all of your employees because you cannot make payroll."
When startups know they're going to fail to make payroll, they fire all employees. Fact of life. Fired employees are the worst affected people when a startup collapses, by a factor of lots. They don't get to call up their credit card company and chargeback forgone wages for the last three years.
When you're the non-technical CEO of a subscription commerce company, and you find yourself in an empty office without employees, if you're hypothetically aware that subscriptions are still active -- which you very well might not be aware of -- you have very limited options for actually fixing it. You might as well ask my dad to do an orderly shutdown of Appointment Reminder given I get hit with a bus tomorrow.
Could this have been handled better? Yeah. There's a reason that when startups ask for advice on what to do in their remaining hours of life we always say the words "Prepare and execute on a plan to effect an orderly wind-down of the business." It's not exactly something people are born knowing and might not be at top-of-mind while they're going through an enormously stressful event.