I agree that scale is one of the factors involved, and businesses tend to go down the Reddit way. That said I don't think it can be generalized to all the businesses out there, and a few of the examples I do, first of all Proton, seems to show to me that a differen kind of successful (albeit not über greedy and trillions-making) business model is possible.
It's probably more relevant for content, e.g. the massive amount of (good) content present in YouTube (and YT music) is the reason I'm willing to pay the premium price even if I have close to zero sympathy for Alphabet as a company. But for services like email, or products like a browser, I really don't care about scale at all, I just want it to work well and possibly don't spy on me to sell my data.