I don't really see why they would hire him to achieve this goal. He had already quit as maintainer. He was out of the picture unless he resigned specifically due to accepting an offer from NVIDIA, but if that was the case and they wanted Nouveau stopped then why is he now contributing a huge patchset? If they hired him and he quit nouveau they could've had him work on the proprietary driver or their own open out of tree kernel driver, but they specifically had him (or at least allowed him) to keep working on nouveau.

Also, if they really wanted to EEE nouveau into oblivion, they would need to get every single prominent nouveau, nova, and NVK developer on payroll simultaneously before they silence them all because once one gets silenced why would any of the others even consider an NVIDIA offer? Especially those already employed at Red Hat? It doesn't really make sense to me as an EEE tactic.

What has been apparent over the past few years is that NVIDIA seems to be relaxing their iron grip on their hardware. They were the only ones who could enable reclocking in such a way that it would be available to a theoretical open source driver and they did exactly that. They moved the functionality they wanted to keep hidden into firmware. They had to have known that doing this would enable nouveau to use it too.

Also, they're hopping on this bandwagon now that NVK is showing promise of being a truly viable gaming and general purpose use driver. Looking at the AMD side of things, they did the same thing back when they first started supporting Mesa directly. They released some documentation, let the community get a minimally viable driver working, and then poured official resources into making it better. I believe the same situation happened with the Freedreno driver, with Qualcomm eventually contributing patches officially. ARM also announced their support of the Panfrost driver for non-Android Linux use cases only after it had been functionally viable for some time. Maybe it's a case of "if you can't beat them, join them" but we've seen companies eventually start helping out on open drivers only after dragging their feet for years several times before.