My guess is they couldn't afford him anymore. As a 36-year-old star veteran, his compensation was probably a sizable chunk of production costs. Meanwhile, the magazine business is still hurting.
It's not impossible his comp was more or less frozen ten or even twenty years ago when the boom times for print were ending. I would be surprised if he was getting four figures a month, and amazed and astounded if it was mid-or-higher four figures.
In fact all freelancers are disposable in magazine writing. It was always one of the original zero hours gig economy gigs.
The real value was in building a brand that could translate to book sales, consultancy, and so on.
