It's an interesting theory to say the least. It's, in fact, what BCHers say happend to Bitcoin, they say that Blockstream captured it and now they pay developers to do nothing because they want to pocket the fees via Liquid. While this theoory might have some truth behind it, I don't think it holds much water, after all, noone uses Liquid.

Now the problem is not that we have some grandiose company controlling everything and everyone, but that we developed a conservative culture where everything that's not part of the popular narrative is an attack on Bitcoin.

For me, the ossification camp is a bigger threat to Bitcoin than any single company or agency, the mempool is telling us that we need to scale, the market is telling us that we need to scale, and we can't scale Bitcoin without evolving the chain, if we don't we will end up with a husk of the real value that Bitcooin brings to the world, which is self sovereignty and censorship resistance, not "hard money" or "digital property".

This is what I see when people start doing things like running Bitcoin Knots as if it would change anything in the network, advocating for filters, removing taproot and segwit altogether, etc...

Doing nothing and advocating for doing nothing is a lot worse than taking a wrong turn.