This is the funnel of capitalism at scale. You have to be an asshole, because if you're not, the real assholes will undercut you and outperform you in every metric the capitalist assholes use to measure success. At that point, you're done. You're out of business unless you find a large enough niche that keeps you in enough revenue to continue operating, which is effectively looking for a needle in a haystack. Not impossible, but extremely difficult and honestly requiring healthy luck.

If we want this to stop being the case, we must figure out a way to shackle the beast of unfettered capitalism. The free market is a sham. Even in the most peak moments of laissez-faire, there are still potent regulations that are often captured and used against new movers in relevant spaces.

I call it picking and choosing my battles. In one project I was on, there was an adjacent project making a decision that would have derailed our project which was a more significant and concrete delivery for customers. The adjacent project was implementing what it considered to be 'philosophically correct' decisions apart from pragmatic considerations. In that instance I played the role of asshole to prevent having a year of work by the team from being unreleasable. I know that many people can do bad things with good intentions, but in this case I'm pretty sure it was in the best interest of everyone/company except the one making one decision in the adjacent project. That decision was overturned and everything worked out great with no one missing whatever that motivated the initial decision. There was something I was told to work on however, whenever there are complaints around tensions like this, I'm told that I'm always technically correct, but that there should be a better way to communicate. It's something I've worked on and seems to be paying off so I can seem less of an asshole and still get the same (technical) results.