I would say that if that is your perspective, then you probably didn't have a close up view of them and how they operated before and after. There's been a lot of spilled ink about it; I won't rehash it here.
> it feels like Microsoft is paying Canonical in order to get help for strangling Linux desktop inside the Windows ecosystem, finally extinguishing desktop Linux installs once and for all.
I expounded on this in another thread - Desktop Linux isn't likely to be something MSFT spends any amount of time concerning themselves with as competition. Realistically, it's not real competition and any harms done to it probably were borne out of callousness or ignorance rather than competitive spite. The competition is OSX and ChromeOS (which I would not consider 'Desktop Linux').