It has gone from a company built around its products to a company focusing on its shareholders with a CEO that is absolutely clueless when it comes to product development.
It's sad but surprising? No.
I know, if only they'd appointed a CEO who would have developed new products beyond the things Steve Jobs had imagined, we might have had a popular smart watch, or maybe wireless earbuds that didn't suck.
And sarcasm aside, the homepod seems like some sort of me-too misfire, but it's not like apple hasn't had those for decades as well (apple tv, ipod hi fi dock... performa after performa...) not to mention actual misfires like the controlless ipod.
Whatever legitimate complaints there are to trot out, an inability to do product development can hardly be among them.
They also managed to all but ruin their computing product line, to the point where people prefer to use ancient machines over recent ones.
The unhappy folks are pretty vocal, but I'm pretty sure Apple have good user data about how the machines are doing: as you say they have a lot of money to spend on the marketing. And historically they have been pretty unromantic about abandoning things that don't do well (iPhone 5c is discussed in this article).
FWIW I am typing this on a 2018 MBP and it's pretty good -- well worth the purchase to me (I can understand if other peoples' mileage may vary). The touch bar is plainly not aimed at me (it would require looking at the keyboard to use, and as I'm a software developer I have never used a function key in my life) but I simply ignore it. And I don't post about it in prominent sites. I don't use the thunderbolt ports either but I also don't wrote about that.
Gasp! How do you skip to the next song!