[gentlesoulcarp]

What happened? They took VC money which forced them to "grow without bounds". This caused them to lose focus and expand their features in irrelevant ways while stretching their internal teams too much and not listening to their active customer base on features to prioritize (even though they had forums for this very purpose). Over time their tone-deaf stubbornness caused the accumulation of too much technical debt. Instead of doubling down on developing performant features that customers actually needed and wanted to use in their knowledge-bases systems, they dressed as Teletubbies (seriously, it was on their "Careers" page a few years back) and created a disjointed mess of alternate products that they did not integrate properly into their system (i.e. Penultimate does not integrate in any useful way). Then they had a brain drain and executive flight (new CEO etc.). Then they moved to Electron, lying to customers saying it was "Feature-Ready" (from the mouth of the CEO) when it was a dumpster fire of a regression, actually removing features and poorly implementing then existing ones. Now its a nagware-bloatware.

Don't take VC money for knowledge-base companies. You need thoughtful development for these types of applications and a commitment to the very long term, which is incompatible with VC. Obsidian has fallen into this same trap.