I agree that this is true for BuzzFeed, but it doesn't really ring true for Vice. Vice started off by doing some fairly serious and gonzo reporting on stories no one else was interested in. This got them noticed and some of it got at least begrudgingly taken seriously by more serious journalists. Say what you want, but Vice won real awards for their reporting. Then they more or less gave up on all of that and put all their energy into running a listicle site.
Because they produce digital content, and content is getting commoditized, competing with everything from other news sites, blogposts, message board posts, youtube videos, soon LLM output, you don't want to be in the digital content business.
They went from dangerous, interesting, and rebellious to the status quo. Which slowly destroyed their competitive advantage. Why would I read Vice when there are 100 other news sites with almost the same content?
There's already an over abundancy of half-assed "news" sources (many them inspired by the BF f-integrity-make-it-viral model).
"I'm upset BF News has tanked," said no one ever.