Note that the title says 'customer loyalty'. I think IntelliJ et al. became popular through word of mouth of developers (that's how I started using IntelliJ and

Note that the title says 'customer loyalty'. I think IntelliJ et al. became popular through word of mouth of developers (that's how I started using IntelliJ and I recommended it to many others). If those developers go from 'IntelliJ is great and the JetBrains people rock' to 'IntelliJ may be great, but JetBrains is scammy', it may be bad for growth. Of course, one can assume that they calculated in some protests + losing customers.