VCs plain and simple. The entire system they operate within is almost perfectly at odds with how a traditional ‘real’ business would operate.
The net result is always some kind of cash grab, and whether the business survives is virtually irrelevant.
Private equity & VCs are IMO recklessly short term-ist with the ‘line goes up’ approach, with as ever, users & consumers & staff picking up the tab in one way or another.
I think there’s a very interesting area for discussion as to whether the fediverse should do more to bake in the idea that instances should be small and co-operate more closely (portable identities, opt-in discovery mechanisms built into the protocol, post history migrations etc) and that we should actively be working against the centralisation of traditional commercial/VC/BigTech approaches.