I think "worthy cause" is a poor choice of words from the OP, but the idea is: WMF has goals that it wants to accomplish in the world, and they should staff on that basis, not on the basis of honoring historical contributions, which were already compensated with the wages at the time.

I don't have an opinion on how that's used in this situation FWIW, this seems like an extremely reasonable engineering team to employ for that basis.