It makes sense to me, considering how damaging and embarrassing the content was. If they confirm it, they lose plausible deniability in being able to claim it's fake.
For a large period of time there was a coordinated effort to purge everything from the Internet and paint anyone bringing it up as a conspiracy theorist. It's harder to get away with that if you call attention to the leak and confirm it's authenticity.
Perhaps the laptop truly belonged to Hunter Biden. Without a confirmation or proper chain of custody, it's hard to say either way. It's not implausible that an advanced threat actor, especially one backed by a nation-state, could create an elaborate laptop forgery to 'layer'[0] hacked material into a legitimate news story and avoid the hack itself taking centre-stage like in 2016 — of course, this is speculation on my part.
[0] https://www.moneylaundering.ca/public/law/3_stages_ML.php#:~...
Whether the information is real is orthogonal to how it was obtained. Conspiring with a hostile adversary to release damaging information about a political opponent is also political malfeasance.
The circumstances of how the information was obtained is incredibly suspect and that deserves scrutiny, even if the information is legitimate and actionable.
> The focus on crack smoking hookers getting clapped by Biden isn't as interesting when it comes to political malfeasance.
That's kind of my point: why was that stuff leaked and spread when there was actually damning evidence? To me, it seems like the point was to release as much damaging and embarrassing content as possible to harm Joe Biden.