Outer wilds, and games like it, do this really sinister thing of rewarding either choice in a supposedly moral decision with exactly the same stuff.
Being a strike breaking dirtbag pays just as well as being a mediator on behalf of striking workers.

This tells us that, despite being worlds apart in terms of their ethical value, the game considers these actions essentially equivalent.
If it's a side quest, which doesn't have any knock-on effects for the greater story, then these actions are completely equivalent.

These games also need to avoid giving your actions ramifications that extend beyond a given arc because an endlessly forking narrative is not something their scope can contain. It's simply too much development time, for one, and likely leads to a convoluted mess of a story anyway

But it emergently seems to create this really gross equivocation of action that I find really squicky.
I don't want the workers to pay me for having mediated their strike. They are underpaid, the whole root of the arc is that they have no money, I don't want to take from them

But I'm never allowed to choose less money. I don't get to act outside of the transactional model established by the game. Being paid lots of money cheapens many of my choices, as it turns out.

And as someone helpfully pointed out, I accidentally wrote outer wilds instead of outer worlds, and umm... whoops!