Crazy opinion incoming: in the current climate ransomware is just pentesting equivalent of the "free" personal injury attorneys. If the pass the pentest, it's free. If you fail, it's crazy expensive. Either way it's relatively benign security auditing that's causing companies to be slightly less stupid about how they handle IT.
It's not the ideal way of doing this, but it's strangely having a positive impact and mitigating belligerent states abilities to conduct offensive cyber operations if things were to heat up.