Cable companies and other infrastructure companies have been focusing on free cash flow and revenue over profit for generations. Interest rates have fluctuated a lot in that time.

Amazon started to be very profitable because they couldn’t reinvest all that money into growing the business in a meaningful way. The timing aligning with when they stopped their Covid-buildout because sales behavior returned to in-store, they started scaling back the billions a year they wasted on Alexa, and started scaling back various moonshot ideas like Amazon Go stores.