This is fundamentally an example of the "drunk searching for his keys under the street light" problem: He's getting a wildly inappropriate form of recognition because that's the form of recognition Microsoft has a system for providing.
I had a similar experience with Amazon: I'm an AWS Hero not because I really make sense as an AWS Hero -- the Heroes program lives under Marketing and is fundamentally about helping people drive more customers to AWS -- but because a couple senior engineers said "we need to do something to recognize Colin's FreeBSD/EC2 work" and the Heroes program was what Amazon had in place.
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This is fundamentally an example of the "drunk searching for his keys under the street light" problem: He's getting a wildly inappropriate form of recognition because that's the form of recognition Microsoft has a system for providing.
I had a similar experience with Amazon: I'm an AWS Hero not because I really make sense as an AWS Hero -- the Heroes program lives under Marketing and is fundamentally about helping people drive more customers to AWS -- but because a couple senior engineers said "we need to do something to recognize Colin's FreeBSD/EC2 work" and the Heroes program was what Amazon had in place.