To start with, they don't pay a lot of their (former) employees. Global travel demand is going to take a long time to recover and a lot of furloughs are going to happen across the industry in any case. Second, the new company probably takes on some amount of new debt. If they can't find it in the private market then there's nothing wrong with the government stepping in. The two keys are that the government steps in after the current equity holders are wiped out completely, and that the government support comes in the form of loans, not grants.
