I posit that "to halt operations" is actually related to "$1.2B deal to pay", in TFA.
In similar manner to how "Hacker" and "News" are fantastically separate utterances, but when we're talking on Hacker News it's pretty regularly a package deal, not an exercise in Levenshtein distance from "Hacker" to "News".
Yes, I am quite certain that the contract was quite explicit about the terms of cancellation. That’s certainly relevant, but we still had the opportunity to refuse to return the money even though it would certainly have ended up in a lawsuit. Would that have been better? No, I do not think that it would have been. In fact, it would have been unethical, possibly even fraud. Articles that phrase this as additional money being paid rather than money being returned are deliberately misleading.
I can't say I've ever signed a lease where the terms of payment or deposit return weren't extremely clear and part of my decision to move in.