It's less that they think it's funny (or even think about it), and much more that the universal oversaturation of markets and their avenues for surplus-as-capital to be made active and productive (a necessary law of capitalism in order to not collapse, a component of capitalism's need for constant growth), which is further tightened by workers' purchasing power being in freefall due to suppressed wages in order to maintain profits, has made it so any slight opening of a new market is utterly torn asunder by the explosive rail-gun jet-stream torrent of backed-up capital starved for movement, bubble or not

but due to said saturation and capital back-up, usually bubble or inevitably made into a bubble just by the volume of hyper-invested capital that has nowhere else to go grossly over-exceeding the capacity of said market and the profits that can be wrung out of it. Which then causes an extreme oversaturation of supply compared to demand, which causes prices, and so profits, to fall into a cascading collapse. This will lead to many things, including further suppression of wages (to try to salvage lost profit) and contraction of markets, which as previously mentioned, are necessary and require constant expansion for surplus-value-as-capital to continue being made active and productive to stave off economic crisis and collapse. Rinse and repeat in the natural and inherent cycle of capitalist contradiction and its inevitable crises. This problem of total market oversaturation and capital having nowhere to go is also in large part where the root of the neo-colonial system of cyclical loans, debt, austerity, then more loans, comes from.

And worth mentioning it's not so much that they would "rather" engage in this than not pay the workers

but that capital needs to go anywhere it can be made active; and those who don't thin their costs as much as possible to maintain the best profit margins possible in doing so to reinvest that surplus as capital, can not compete with those who do, and will be ruined and subsumed by their competitors (those that even remain anyway). It's not a choice by the capitalist who has any other while still remaining a capitalist, because making any other choice means not being a capitalist anymore and being cannibalized by the capitalists who "won". They will never make a choice that ends in their ruin, and would have no material reason to, hence why they need to be not given a choice by an organized working class.

If only someone could have foreseen these contradictions and problems. Perhaps by forming a concrete analysis of capitalist laws and relations and the roles played within it by its constituent classes, then providing the world with a methodology of unmatched predictive power to expose it and awaken others in the working class to the inherently inevitable need for its forcible overthrow to overcome these fundamental contradictions.