It would be consistent with my repeated personal experience if promises were made to this woman and then not kept. Higher academia uses all sorts of dark patter

It would be consistent with my repeated personal experience if promises were made to this woman and then not kept. Higher academia uses all sorts of dark patterns on students. In two summers of undergrad, I was "casually" promised a summer stipend by a lab which went on to vigorously avoid making it concrete or putting it in writing until I twisted their arms with a competing offer. I don't know that they wouldn't have paid me, but I later learned that they had done this to other students, so it's a thing that happens. When I was applying to PhD programs, my favored lab accepted me on the understanding that I would be funded through a particular grant and "discovered" after the admissions cycle was over that there wasn't room for me on the grant after all and could I please make up the difference? I refused, of course, and fortunately my second choice made a schedule exception for me. That worked fine for a while, and then they straight up altered the deal to the tune of $20,000 in my second year. I hit the "eject" button on Academia and didn't look back. The institutions involved were Harvard, Cambridge, and Carnegie Mellon, so this isn't a matter of getting caught on a sinking ship. They do it because they can.