It's not becoming more cutthroat, it's become more opposed to humanity.
It was always cutthroat, just the reality could be hidden from the rank and file when there was so much low hanging fruit leading to organic growth
> My team decided we had to offer the same frictionless experience on Microsoft’s latest browser, Edge, which was in development at the time. After weeks of back-and-forth, the team politely and firmly rejected bundling our plugin into the new Microsoft browser. The reason? Their KPI was to minimize the download size of the browser, and helping us would not help them reach that goal.