As unnecessary abrasiveness seems to be yours, Arsene mon frere. 
I didn’t say it was either of those things… just that it’s not likely to be a significant enough trend to back up your speculation that it’s the reason CoG doesn’t have more checkpoint saves.
Unpacking that speculation
Look, if I understand correctly, your hypothesis there ran along these liines:
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It’s good business sense for CoG to try to reduce the number of people who request a Steam refund in their first hour of play (or within 48 hours of purchase on Google Play).
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Anything CoG does that
(a) increases the time it takes even speed-readers to finish reading through a game 1-2 times, or
(b) delays the moment when readers discover that they don’t like a game,
will result in fewer people requesting a refund within that automatic eligibility period.
-
Forcing people to replay from scratch if they want to try a different path through the game achieves 2(a) and maybe also 2(b).
-
Forcing people to replay from scratch if they made a choice whose outcome they don’t like also achieves 2(a) and maybe also 2(b).
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But if checkpoint saves were more common, people wouldn’t have to replay from scratch.
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Therefore CoG discourages checkpoint saves out of business interest – all the more so since (arguably) their formula has gotten stale and the games they release less popular.
Let me know if anything in that summary is a misreading. If not, I agree, it doesn’t come out of nowhere. 1 and 2, at any rate, are clearly true. I’m sure there are speed readers who go on to ask for refunds, and I can imagine that a few of them sometimes get caught out with games they don’t quite finish in time.
But of course forcing people to replay the game from scratch if they made a choice they dislike also really pisses some people off. Some share of those people will immediately rage-quit and demand a refund. By your original hypothesis, CoG thinks it’s in its business interest to have a system that generates an increased number of those rage-refunds in exchange for the refunds it’s saving through Steps 3 and 4 above.
If so, that strikes me as a pretty poor business strategem, not a clever one. The people you’d be trying to catch on Step 3 above, who want to read the game more than once (but only for an hour or two and then never again) without paying for it? Whisper it softly, but there are other ways they can do that already. So the refunds you’re preventing there are from speed readers who want their CoGs for free but are unfamiliar with pirate apk sites – not a demographic big enough that CoG should be shaping its strategy around it. Step 4, meanwhile, seems likely to be one where you’re actually pushing a share of your readers to a point where they decide early that they don’t like the game – the exact opposite of 2(b).
So yeah, I don’t think you’re making anything up, just that you’ve misjudged where the incentives lie, and that it’s very unlikely that you’ve hit on a covert financial incentive for CoG’s unenthusiastic attitude toward saves.
It may be worth noting that CoG’s own policy on refunds has no time limit, which one might have expected if they were intentionally chasing the incentives you speculated about. Rather, they’ll refund two games for any reason, no questions asked. That points to a different (more common and frankly more sensible) business strategy, where the overarching goal isn’t refund minimization. Rather, making the first few refunds easy encourages people to buy games they’re not sure about, on the promise that they can give it back if they don’t like it past the demo period.
Anyway. I don’t know if when you went on to refer to common online complaints, you were thinking about some that supported your original point, or whether you were moving the goalposts to argue about the second thing I said… that even though the rage-quitters likely outnumber the refund-requesters you were speculating about, their refund requests are probably also not hugely important in the scheme of things.
I’ll cheerfully stick by that. You can’t reach every audience; you can’t prevent every refund; you need to know what you’re trying to create, so that you can distinguish your actual core audience from the multitude of loud voices online. CoG has achieved a still-growing audience with what it offers; it should focus on creating and sustaining a distinctive player experience, and try to build its brand around it. If the core experience/brand it has been profitably developing is “consequential choice,” then for it to put in save-at-will or a back button would be like Fromsoft putting in a full-on easy mode. (And before another wave of people jump in to wave Elden Ring at me, yes, it shows that once the brand is well established, you can ease up a bit on the more exacting aspects of the brand. Maybe wider use of checkpoint saves could count as an equivalent here? )
Congratulations!
(I never knew there were baby emojis here before now, lol).