That could be A problem, but to me THE problem is that the larger companies buy these smaller companies for resource extraction, not to make the product better.

In this frame you can see that making the product worse (paying less for its upkeep) and raising prices are just two sides of the same coin - extract more resources.

Almost no big company has any reason to shepherd a product in a way that's beneficial to its users because they have so much momentum that even changing their approach either costs too much money or those in power are too insulated from the outcomes (fix it for me or I will fire you while I continue to make bad choices and under fund the product).