Highly speculative or hyped companies will probably have a somewhat more difficult time attracting VC investors, but so many of those turn out to be frauds or vaporware that I'm not too concerned. Companies like the ones that benefitted from the SPAC boom a couple years ago. Most of those ended up being highly overvalued companies that lost money for the post-VC investors.
Or maybe the goal ought to change.
Maybe everything getting acquired by a huge corporation is not a good thing.
The chilling effect may be more around the design tools market specifically
The case of Adobe is a bit different than anti-monopoly movements against other $T because the lack of 'serious' $100B+ market cap competitors here. So while say an adtech can have multiple big buyers in the $100B+ club, it's unlikely to see Autodesk, Corel, Canva, etc to do a $20B purchase here. AFAICT only Microsoft would sensibly be able to put its hat in the ring at high levels, made even more sane b/c the GitHub purchase, but even that was at $7.5B. So if there is no such thing as a decacorn in design tools b/c Adobe can't do big M&A, then VCs are only looking at exits at $1B, and funding + valuations get less frothy vs other markets.
All that starts mattering around Series A or Series B stage, as they look at how much $ they can exit at, and how big of a follow-on round the company can get with the same constraints. If a VC has a fund of > $50M, a pitch that cannot exit at above $B may break their portfolio design.
I'd rather have "regulatory issues" in a case like this even if it does slow down VC money
As we saw with the Blizzard acquisition the UK CMA will bend to international pressure if it's the only one holding out.
I read that MS agreed to remedial changes for the purchase to be approved by CMA, but those changes were the same ones that CMA originally asked for at the start that MS refused. So CMA got what it wanted but it's still seen as a MS as eventual winner and CMA loser.
In certain narrow cases maybe, where you really want the monopoly-holder to buy the startup. But overall this is better for VCs because competition breeds both investment and acquisition opportunities. In most cases 3 big competitors seeking to acquire your startup is better than 1 big monopoly seeking to acquire your startup.