Considering Gabe is ex-microsoft and wants to distance himself as much as possible from them, I highly doubt that'd work, he'd go down fighting at the very least.
Does he want to distance himself? Gabe said he learned more in his short months-long tenure at MS than he did in the rest of his academic career. He dropped out of Harvard, mind you.
He modeled his entire company off of MS. He even adopted their primary strategy, buy, polish and package. It's literally just embrace, extend, extinguish all over. Balmer taught him very well.
I really don't get why people think he's all that different from any other billionaire. He got there by buying out competition, and if they wouldn't sell, theft and litigation.
Not saying he's different from other rich people, but Valve developing both SteamOS and Proton is a clear message they don't want to rely on Microsoft and their software.
He's said that way before 2020, also. Publicly. It seems that has not changed. Most in that kind of position would come to the same conclusions of buying up the competition and making money off their products. It's cheaper, it's easier, you already get the infrastructure and customer base, etc. What capitalist wouldn't try to go that route?
Honestly might not be such a bad idea. Unity is built on .Net, which Microsoft also owns. The teams could work together to get Unity modernized and cleaned up, and I bet developers would trust Microsoft more than Unity (Consider that Microsoft also owns VS Code, Github, npm and more that tons of devs frequently use)