Is is that the company thought it was solving something that turned out not to be a problem (or a compelling-enough problem worth solving), or that it was building a solution without knowing or caring to know what problem it solved?

If the current situation itself is already generating profit for the company, I recommend that you refrain from getting involved in it and instead carefully convey an alternative solution to upper management

Wrote this sometime ago - https://aishwarya-48913.medium.com/startup-pivots-how-we-ite...

some of the learnings are not applicable anymore, but i benefited a lot from the framework we created