Only 14% of total sales for Skyrim were for PC, everything else invariably being some console or other that does not support modding. Although I'm sure mods help sales, from past experience Bethesda can pretty safely draw the conclusion that they are not critical, and were probably banking on new revenue from the Creation Club offsetting sales lost because of a lack of mod support.
And the response was to work up a system to get mods to consoles, free mods if viable but paid/qa'd mod if perchance a console was run by anal-retentive corporate executives.
Seriously - they went to the trouble to get free mods to the XBox community, then did a *separate* system to jump through hoops getting qa'd and paid mods (And yeah, it's paid mods) to the Playstation community.
They absolutely knew before either of these the hoops Sony was going to make them jump through, but rather than just making a single use solution for both platforms, they created two separate systems for modding, and ran them in parallel, despite knowing there is a thriving mod community on Nexus.
I'm not immune to the risks of 'trusting' a corporation; Some of us remember Microsoft 'adopting' a version of java and making it not
quite compatible as a strategy to kill a potential market breaker. But nothing BSG has done indicates this intent; everything indicates they are fully aware that a thriving mod ecology benefits them.
And given that they went to extra and completely unnecessary effort to actively
introduce the X-box community to that thriving ecology, their action seem, to me, to belie any attempt to assert control over the community.
I could be wrong. Heck, it could be they fully intend to and didn't communicate that to the devs and went 'Gee, I wish they hadn't done that' the day after that. But the simplest explanation is they see more revenue in getting mods to their complete fanbase, PC and Console, than in trying to monetize it as a revenue stream they would have to exert control over and manage.