[nostrademons]

"It seems the bigger a company gets the more they favor predictability over excellence."

In addition to the reasons other comments have pointed out, this is likely economically rational. If a startup does nothing, they die. If they do something but it's not excellent, they die. Thus they have a strong incentive to do something excellent even if they have to fail a lot of times beforehand.

Whereas a big company is already doing something that's working and bringing in billions. Just by regression to the mean, there's a good chance that anything additional they do will make things worse. So they have a strong incentive to be conservative and protect the golden goose rather than trying things that may work out well but have a chance of harming the brand or business.