Basically, HH was developing Prey 2 for Bethesda, Bethesda liked what HH was doing and said to themselves "hm, we'd like to own this studio but we don't want to pay a lot of money for it" so they started failing HH's milestone submissions for arbitrary reasons and used the failed milestones as an excuse to stop paying HH which brought the studio to the brink of bankruptcy. Then Bethesda's parent company swooped in and was like "hey, looks like you're having a tough time there, you sure you wouldn't like us to buy you out?" HH only just so managed to make it out of that situation alive and maintain their independence. Until now.
So yeah, the publishing side of Bethesda can be incredibly scummy. It's why I've avoided buying any of their games in recent years (which wasn't easy since I actually quite like some of their franchises).