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Logically a worked firing would make zero sense/be of very little value to AEW anyway given the ripple effects resulting from it.
Tony Khan always wants to present himself as the babyface promoter. That was a lot easier to do when everyone was down on WWE and Vince was still the public face of it.
WWE have got better, Vince is more or less out of the picture, a lot of people have moved on from the Saudi Arabia stuff even though it's still happening.
WWE aren't, right now, the "heel" promotion. AEW aren't a heel promotion either but they've clearly lost their grasp on being the babyface promotion where everybody wants to work. They've been a bit chaotic this year, and their booking is a bit of a mess. CM Punk has a lot of fans, and Tony Khan had to know that firing him risked losing his fans with him, and why would you take that gamble for an angle?
When attendance is down, when AEW are running directly opposite NXT, when TV deals need renewing, all of that, why would they keep one of their biggest names off TV for months, let his departure derail the company's momentum and overshadow the success of Wembley? And do it all in a way that suggests it's very much not a storyline, and that he won't be coming back, if everything's actually fine and he's still working there?
There are a million ways you could've gotten to a potential Punk vs. MJF feud with the roles reversed - choosing a route which involves taking one of your most popular guys off of TV for months and objectively hurting numbers in the process would be a really dumb way to get to it.
To put it simply, why not make money from somebody when you could be making money from them?
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