Nah Pipeline are just fans / leakers / gossips who use whatever they can get their hands on. File-diving, dev gossip, evocati info etc.
They'll get steers from (and get steered by) CIG officially at points. And have often got things wildly wrong when predicting positive outcomes

. But they're happy enough to go 'off message'.
They've been pursuing the whole US layoffs things for a while now, despite CIG denying it during the early flutters. And hell, this stuff is all bad press for CIG which they'd doubtless rather keep quiet. (If it's accurate: CIG have axed two popular figures who just presented two major Citcon features scheduled for 2024. Base building and multiplayer engineering. Not exactly a good look

)