Pretend he’s an offsite consultant. Now does it make sense? His employers are aware he’s making them substantial money and it’s likely they’re aware he left his last, much more demanding job, for being too stressful. So they know if they put more pressure on him than he feels like dealing with he’ll leave. Whether he’s deceiving the two proper jobs he has as an employee or not is a separate matter but they have no leverage over him either way.
I understand it for contract work, yes, but full-time salaried work is different, for exactly this reason; the expectation implicit in the relationship is that you are working full time, not just on a contracted project basis.
He negotiated different expectations. He was explicit about wanting a job with different expectations than the usually implicit ones and if at any point any of the parties find it no longer to their liking they can just end it.
If you don’t like the usual game you can make your own new game with your own rules if you can find someone else to play with you.
