There is no way to know for certain.

Rockstar almost certainly acquired these idiot clowns because they decided they could make more money by officially/unofficially endorsing and regulating RP servers that fleece people for money with paid memberships tiers and in game item purchases, than they would by suing them all out of existence.

Rockstar very, very easily could have sued them out of existence, and probably put many of them in jail.

There is 0 chance that FiveM devs were not personally enriching themselves in some roundabout manner with their product, before they became official employees.

They very likely got an offer from Rockstar that basically looked like ‘Hey, we know you’re making money off of illegally modifying our product, you can either work for us and make that money for us, or we sue you into an early grave’.

My guess to the future with GTA6 is that if a clear winning group emerges from this current drama shitfest, Rockstar will put them in charge of basically licesensing out a framework for GTA 6 online servers.

Or, if the shitfest is too stupid and obnoxious, they’ll shit can basically everyone involved, maybe keep a few who can actually code decentlt around to work on other parts of the game, and any GTA 6 RP system would have to be built basically from scratch.

… And most of the people trying to build it from scratch would most likely be those people who just got shitcanned, and they would most likely be cease and desist / sued into oblivion.