Rather than putting up a conspiracy theory the much more plausible explanation is that this board evidently pissed off a lot of customers, powerful people in tech and almost all employees of openai.
The problem is not that Sam has some totally unique DNA. Customers are reacting to 1) the board’s apparent rejection of the existing products and business model, and 2) the capricious and incompetent way the board handled this.
Companies are making huge bets, and a seemingly stable and industry-leading supplier just turned out to be unreliable. Of course people are angry and hesitant to keep doing business with OpenAI.
Observing from the outside, it feels like the bulk of the credit goes to their AI team and that Sam was just there to make sure the machine was well oiled. Maybe he was really good at that, I don't know. Their productization of models wasn't that great, starting with the name, "ChatGPT". IMO, the real driving force has been the unparalleled capabilities of their models rather than branding or marketing.
That's a big part of the success of any company. Sam and Greg were responsible for recruiting the team that made it possible and removing the many obstacles those people faced over the years, even though their competition had much more money and prestige at the starting point.
It seems this was a coup of Microsoft together with Altman to go full force ahead with the commercial upscaling.
In the past there was already a small uprising, and all who didn't like the Altman cult ran off to anthropic. So all that's left in openai are huge fans of Altman. So it only makes sense that you piss off almost all remaining employees, its survivor bias at work.