I find it more peculiar that people think companies "must" (or even should) have long-term survival as a goal.
note: There are of course many aspects that would make this a bit of a difficult thing to study, mergers and acquisitions being just one for instance, and at least for small businesses, "birth" and especially "death" dates are incredibly hard to pin down. But still something I've been interested in for a while.
By the way, the hardest part IMO would not be accounting for mergers/acquisitions etc., but accounting for the survivorship bias of just forgetting about the companies that were once big but which we don't even remember anymore.