You're missing the point, which has been made repeatedly now. Obviously they wanted to avoid costly consequences and breaking the law is one easy way to do that. This applies to nearly all businesses, nearly all of the time, and is nothing at all to do with the conditions of this particular business. Good businesses respect that there are some rules that they must follow, costly to do so or otherwise. Bad businesses ignore the rules, and do things like what P&O did. If we're willing to tolerate that in some cases but not others we're fundamentally undermining the basis of employment law. If a business can only survive by breaking the rules in this way, it's better it doesn't survive at all. The consequences of that are exactly the same, but it doesn't have the effect of undermining the rules for everyone else.
I assumed you were going to present one that might be justified, yes. Clearly that was too naive of me.