About Mikkelsen and Hyundai, I think the story is true because the leak in the news clearly sounds to come from Mikkelsen’s side (maybe not him directly) and I don’t see the point for them to criticize Hyundai for free in his situation looking for a Rally1 drive.

About Mikkelsen and Skoda, I think it a bit differently (I don’t think it’s a timing issue).
I really think that at the end of 2019, Skoda wanted to end its works program as a racing team and not anymore having pure works driver (even if supporting partially some but all manufacturers do so in Rally2); also because winning with a works driver, even more if he is a former WRC driver is not as good as winning with client or youngsters in terms of ad for the brand.
But as they lost all the big titles in 2020 (WRC-2 against Ostberg, WRC-3 against Huttunen and ERC against Lukyanuk), they thought they needed a former WRC driver to counter Ostberg and they took Mikkelsen (who didn’t have other serious offer considering he doesn’t to pay to drive). It works in 2021 and at the beginning of 2022, the young Toksport bunch was not reliable enough to bet all on them against Rossel, Suninen or potentially Ostberg. But as Toksport now has a driver with Rally1 experience (Lindholm) who can be considered as a reliable driver for Rally2, they don’t need anymore Mikkelsen whose WRC experience was hiding a bit the quality of the car in winning. As Mikkelsen doesn’t want to pay to drive, they know the risk is very low to see him as a competitor in 2023. Only risk Skoda takes in my opinion, now that Mikkelsen has missed Rally1 opportunity, is that Mikkelsen is hired by Toyota to help to develop the Rally2 car (if his Skoda contract was not including a non-competition clause, which is possible though because Mikkelsen had some early exit option to join Rally1 so probably there were some counterparts).
It is just an hypothesis but it’s how I see what happened between Skoda and Mikkelsen and I think the Hyundai stuff is not really linked with it (we know for a couple of months about Hyundai having cheated Mikkelsen so Skoda could have took him back).