The most interesting part is, what would happen if they didn't return fee? What would PayPal and Paxos do? Would this motivate them to immediately start demarketing of Bitcoin and decentralized Proof Of Work?
They can't demarket BTC if the miners had kept the fee, even if they wanted to do it. BTC's isn't centralized, and anyone with understanding of how it works knows there is no way to enforce a refund or reversal of payment in the BTC's network, unlike in centralized payment systems and centralized crypto. So even if they were going to publish negative info or articles about BTC, it won't change anything, institutions and the media have been doing that for a long time to deceive only the gullible.
Probably it was a right choice this time because these big corporations have enormous power, it would make F2Pool and others to look bad and PayPal would try to market itself even better and socially step up because as you know, people are naive and lack critical thinking. Otherwise, I totally agree with you, big corporations should pay! Always!
Yeah people are naive, but if they believe miners or POW is bad because miners kept the fee your attached to your tx, but paypal is 'good' 'better' when they freeze and confiscate people's funds and could probably seize your money if your make posts that "hurt their feelings online", then there's nothing you can do to help these kind of people, and maybe BTC wasn't meat for them at all.