“Skiplagging” — or booking a flight with a layover to skip the last leg of travel — is a common hack for travelers who don’t want to pay for a direct flight or who to save money on airfare to a connecting destination. Airlines contend the practice results in lost revenue for seats on planes.
Yeah pretending to care about the empty seat is totally ridiculous, they just know it sounds bad to say ‘we wanted more money from people for the first leg even though we can obviously still make enough profit to cover a whole extra flight and give a discount large enough to make all the extra hassel worthwhile for enough people that it’s worth addressing’