That's definitely the cause of it, but it doesn't make sense to me. Once you're on S&P 500, how much growth can you realistically do? I don't see why investors don't make Google & Apple pay dividends.
https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/aapl/dividend-...
Regarding dividends, in theory when company spends $1 per share on a dividend, its stock price should go down by $1 to compensate for this. So receiving a dividend is kind of like forced selling a small portion of your stock (except that you don't pay the transaction fee).