> In it, the company claims that The Wirecutter initially picked NextDesk as an editorial recommendation but later downgraded the recommendation after NextDesk declined to set up an affiliate-revenue agreement.

I believe you're taking "after" in this sentence way too literally. The order of events isn't in dispute, what's at issue is whether Nextdesk's declination to enter a revenue sharing agreement caused Wirecutter to downgrade their ranking.

This comment by geofft convinced me Nextdesk (RIP) was in the wrong in this dispute. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22144078

You're reading a causal meaning into "after" that clearly was not intended by the author of Wirecutter's response. They are clearly expressing a simple temporal relation and not a causal one.

Please be clear that I have no opinion on the truthfulness of the Wirecutter's response. Perhaps they're truly corrupt as all hell. I have no inside knowledge of how they operate.

However, it is absolutely clear you're reading something into the "after" that was not intended.

"After" is a temporal word. We have may ways to clearly express cause that could have been used. Generally, one uses "after" to imply cause without explicitly saying it.

Instead, Wirecutter has made a factually incorrect statement. That Thing 1 happened, then Thing 2 happened, then Thing 3 happened is not in dispute. Also not in dispute: Thing 3 happened after Thing 2, which happened after Thing 1.

"After" can certainly imply causality but that is not necessarily the case and, from context, we can see it was clearly not the author's intent.