Being forced to do thing X is usually a negative result. There's nothign saying that the only two options are stay and die or flee. I mean if you're playing monsters that are smart and stuff.
I find "being forced" to be a curious way of thinking about it. If we were talking about PCs then, yeah, I agree that failing a Wisdom checked and being required to flee combat would qualify as "being forced" to do something, of the rules hijacking player agency.
But morale checks determine the behavior of NPCs. So I see it less as anybody being forced to do anything...certainly there's no magical
fear affecting the NPCs...and more just using dice to offload the tricky decision of when to flee combat. The players make that decision for themselves, but because GMs have perfect information it's a hard to really put yourself into the mind of the NPCs and make the decisions for them. At least, I personally find it hard to do that sort of thing objectively. So the morale check creates a kind of behavioral symmetry.
We (the Shadowdark community, and the OSR community more broadly) like to brag about how, in our obviously vastly superior form of roleplaying, knowing when to run away from a fight is part of wise "skilled play", I agree it seems odd that when NPCs do the same thing it's because they
fail a Wisdom check.
Not that I plan on changing anything, but I do think it's a great question.
EDIT: That said, and maybe what you are trying to say, is that the morale check really just indicates a collapse of courage, not a rational decision to make a tactical retreat, and that the latter would be up to the GM to decide, not the dice. All of which I think is also a totally fair interpretation.
