Zalando were publicly hung out to dry by Rocket Internet as they were sure they would fail. After the turn around they are now the poster company of Rocket Internet despite Rocket having done nothing to help them.
Zalando seems really nice. I have no connections at all, but they really won me as a loyal customer because I really prefer the experience over all alternatives (especially including Amazon and local stores for everything except really pricy clothing).
More importantly though, I am really impressed and surprised by some of the research coming out of Zalando. Flair[1] has some great ideas (especially at the time of release, when there weren't pretrained huggingface models for everything to build upon) and a really well-written paper. Colleagues also have had a good experience using the software and achieved very results with adapted NED tasks.
Look at their global results, Europe is largely irrelevant compared to APAC and MENA. Germany exit was loss of prestige losing home market but also not a major loss of revenue compared to gains elsewhere in the world.
All Rocket ventures were designed to be sold. Most of them did poorly. There is a cost/benefit ratio at which it doesn't make sense to dump money on the business, but the business itself still has value, so selling is a good strategy to cut your losses and/or make some profit.
I think you missed the fact that Foodpanda and Delivery Hero were both Rocket companies. It was that Foodpanda was doing soo poorly they gave it to Delivery Hero which was for Europe. Overall, Delivery Hero/Foodpanda are pulling out of markets repeatedly. And not small markets either.