Netflix has co-CEOs. One for tech and one for content. They value both equally

Amazon is a tech company and pays their software developers tech company wages.

The rest are media businesses. HBOMax specifically are owned by Discovery who has always been interested in doing things as cheaply as possible.

While Disney/Hulu are also on the surface media companies. Disney bought BamTech who had the best streaming technology/people outside of Netflix and Disney has always cared about technology

But why for everything that is holy are you watching the ad tier of streaming services?

The Roku Channel used to be really bad at this; I had a bad experience over a year ago and avoided it until recently as they carry a show I was watching that left another platform in the past couple months and it's good at this now.

Of course, it still has the basic issues that make me skip back after ad breaks frequently. a) they consistently insert ads slightly offset of the intended insertion points; b) the ad has different audio/video/hdcp properties than the content its inserted into, so my receiver (and sometimes my tv) blanks audio to resync when the content resumes.

I'm not thrilled that Amazon added ads into their streaming product, but at least the insertions are well timed and I don't recall audio dropouts when content is resumed (but maybe I missed it).

Content is mostly what matters.

You are missing a key aspect of what is going on. People buy streaming services based on the content, not the app. People will complain about the app, put bad reviews up, and still pay their monthly fee, which is better for the business than having zero tech complaints and cancelling because the content sucks.