I suggest that the passage that you read begins with a claim that seems unreasonable ("but I've bought a $2 dress from Temu!"), and then explains its thesis in order to make you view that claim in a different way ("VC capital paid for half of that dress!") I also would like to mention that this is a very common and unremarkable way to begin an argument.
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All that aside, I’m happy that VCs are paying for my stuff! I have no idea why they keep doing that. They’ve studied my behaviour so they should already know I’ll delete {app_name} as soon as I get a better deal elsewhere. (Better yet, I’ll keep both and let them fight!)
Maybe they can capture the market for a brief moment, but if they do have a long term strategy, I’m not seeing one.
I'm not? It drowns out any competition and all we are left with is a single company with a monopoly that speed runs enshitification where consumers lose.
This can briefly happen, but until VCs run out of money we’ll get competitors about as soon as the enshittification starts. Well, at least in theory, regulatory caprure is a thing, so it doesn’t always work out.
This also doesn’t work when there’s network effects at play. I believe this is why Grab (Southeast Asian Uber/UberEats) is adding social features like a whole fucking messenger into the app. Didn’t help: Bolt has launched there as well and is often cheaper and faster so I usually check both.
(Now, Grab is publicly traded, and maybe it’s profitable, which would undermine my whole argument. But I’m still getting cheap transportation and discounted food. Maybe they externalize the costs somewhere else which indeed also sucks.)