Something that I think is a bit silly is that when the game started they used to hand out 500 crystals for being unable to log in for 15 min with a server problem, but this kind of, "Sorry about that!" gift has largely gone away.
But these gifts generate a LOT of goodwill, and they don't have to be huge to do so. Personally I think 500 crystals is a bit much unless it happens during your payout hour for Arena (used to be for both arenas but now just fleet), but imagine if they gave out 2M credits and 2 zeta mats whenever there was a log in problem, with an extra +100 crystals if it happens during your fleet payout hour? None of that is going to be enough that people are going to hope for the servers to go down, but it is enough to make people think CG cares.
They can even budget this into the economy. Plan ahead about how much stuff they want to give out for bugs, log-in problems, etc. Exclude make-goods from that budget if folks were specifically deprived of a known reward (like a journey guide event fails to deliver the shards or something else equally specific), and the rest of the budget just gets spent over the year. If you run out too soon, then the next year you either increase the budget or moderately reduce the rewards or whatever to make it work out.
But no matter how you slice it, 20-50M credits over the course of a year won't bust our economies, but a couple million at a time is enough to make players think that CG feels their pain.
It's just good marketing. Personally I don't need this. I stay in the game mostly bc of the friends I've made. We support each other and have formed our own communities. But enough people complain about this sort of thing that it seems like it matters to a significant fraction of the player base.
I mean, CG has an advertising budget. Just think of it like that, only the company doesn't have to pay anything for it.