In experimental fields, when submitting to Nature / Science / Cell, it's likely that your work ends up getting reviewed by someone who sees you as a competitor (this mentality drives me mad).

Hence, they will sometimes try to make sure you don't publish or at least get downgraded to sister journals, such as Nature Communications.

Another problem are editorial decisions. Great work is often desk rejected because it's judged not to be significant or interersting enough (usually the author comes from a less prominent university).

For example, the original CRISPR article was desk rejected by most journals and the fact that the author's affiliation was a no-name research centre in Alicante (Spain) surely played a role. This delayed CRISPR getting widely known by a few years...