There's certainly something in that, though giving a product away for free is generally seen as something you do when you want to PROMOTE that product, which is probably not the message WotC wants to send about the old OA books right now.
man I feel like some people are deliberately ignoring the original issue of WotC profiting off OA after saying they're gonna be more sensitive in the future. I can't say "my restaurant is now vegetarian!" and still serve bacon just because a few customers want it.
you can give away a product without "promoting" it, and bringing it up this way would be seen as a PR move to address this issue. yes, people are gonna start downloading it, I even might myself. but as you said virtually no one is running Kara-Tur these days, and it would remain largely a curiosity and historical piece, and again WotC wouldn't make any money off this. personally I feel like WotC should just do this with at least all pre-2e material, but that's a conversation for another time.
TBH, if WotC wants to defuse the festering OA issue, then the most effective way to do that would be to promptly announce and release a brand new set of Asian themed (and Asian-written) 5e books that avoided the cultural landmines that OA stepped on.
Cos being serious for a minute, when was the last time anyone in this thread actually ran a campaign set in Kara-tur? Or with the 2e OA rules? Or even a 3e Rokugan game? I strongly, strongly suspect the number of people actually doing that is absolutely tiny. I understand the grognard/oldskool FR-er completist urge, and hell, I've read the Kara-Tur books entirely for that reason myself, but if the demographic of D&D players who actually use this stuff right now in live games reaches half a percent of the total D&D player base, I'd be staggered.
But the bad smell around the old books lingers, because the Kara-Tur line and the 3e OA book is the most recent coverage of this sort of thing under the D&D banner. To make the (entirely legit) controversy go away, and to demonstrate they've genuinely changed how they address cultures like this, WotC need to actually bring out a product that makes these old books obsolete. Hell, the 5e playerbase dwarfs all other editions put together I strongly suspect (with the possible exclusion of Pathfinder), so a 5e treatment would become the touchstone for 'WotC does Asian-inspired fantasy' almost immediately, and once it does, nobody will be talking about the 2e OA any more other than 'jeez, I'm glad we've moved on from the bad old days' terms.
I'm not against the idea, I think it would be neat to see an Asian inspired campaign setting if it were well done. but to do so in response to the controversy surrounding the book would honestly feel like tokenism at worst. I don't think you need it to be entirely Asian-written either, but if they did do that would the authors be brought in and thrown out after the book came out?
WotC already dropped the ball on Chult, and making this hypothetical well done setting would show that they're serious, sure, but how they do it is probably just as important as the content they put out.
also while we're here, I've always felt like 3rd ed. OA was the more problematic one, at least in terms of execution. at least AD&D OA was attempting to make a fully realized fantasy Asia, 3rd ed. was just WotC being like "oh hey this new-fangled franchise we just bought is Oriental, let's just make a D&D book about it and slap the Oriental Adventures name on it!" I still remember my younger self (who had yet to play D&D or any tabletop rpg) finding that book at barnes and noble and thinking "wtf why is this just a bunch of samurai and Japanese stuff??"
also, tangentially related, but am I the only one who felt like Pathfinder dropped the ball completely with their take on the "Asian" part of Golarion?
And instead create new landmines as it is impossible to please the "everything is racist" crowd while still putting out a product useable for gaming.
No, the best way to defuse it is to make vague promises, a token gesture like a warning page and then never do asian themed stuff in the near future again.
yeah, no, "people are too easily offended!" is not a valid excuse, sorry.
They have an Ireland, though. Ravenloft, on the other hand, has multiple french nations as part of the Core.
okay, great, Faerun has one (1) Ireland in it, and Ravenloft took some inspiration from France. maybe if I wait long enough someone will tell me that Khorvaire is actually based on interwar period Europe.