I said since start of 2022. AoE II tournaments (including RF3 and Jordan's announced tournament) - cca 90k. AoE IV - 450k. I count N4C as 250k as it's the total cost of the tournament from what I know. Everything is listed on Liqupedia.How are you getting to $450k? Even if you include every single showmatch, S,A,B, & C-tier tournament listed on liquipedia since the game existed you only get to ~$385k.
If you use the same timeline and look at AoE2 you get to about ~$215k, so the gap isn't even nearly as wide as you make it out to be, and is almost entirely explained by the switch of NAC4 -> NC4, which was not a choice of Microsoft, but of Nili.
And my point is, compare the games from purely business PoV right now.
AoE IV - way higher prize pools, having a LAN event this year already, great production quality, like 15k peak? viewers on a single channel Final day and 125k tournament following shortly.
AoE II - 5x less invested money in 2022, production is still decent but not comparable to LAN and I don't think we had 15k on a single channel so far this year.
If I want to go with the more succesful game, I'd choose AoE IV based on this, or I'll wait. Spending tons of money on IIs now simply doesn't make sense for companies like RB. Money brings money and as long as Nili keeps giving way more funds to IVs compared to IIs, he's succesfully shutting down further support for AoE II and possibly shifting it to IVs aswell. Which means more players will also switch to IVs, etc. When AoE IV came out and I saw how trash the game is, I was sure IIs will survive as E-sport. With Hera, Liereyy switching, biggest streamers leaving, no real S-tier events for AoE II and tons of money in AoE IV, I'm far less sure about it. At the same time, it's a mistake of the community being happy with the 5k or 10k that Nili drops from MS support, instead of constantly pushing for more.