It's easy to take this and the quote above and leap to the assessment that students like professors that give good grades. But why is this? I think it comes from a fundamental disconnect between what a lot of students really want and what universities are complicit in pretending to offer. A lot of students want the degree so they can get a job in field XYZ. Universities are more than happy to take that desire to get a job and conflate it with a desire to get a higher-level education. They are the gate-keepers to getting a job in many different fields but in many ways act as if they have almost zero responsibility for that responsibility.
Just imagine if universities decided to no longer offer degrees and only offered the opportunity for deep understanding and learning. Get rid of grades too, just offer P/F for readiness for the next level of teaching. Do you think student evaluations would still have this bias?