TFA takes as its hypothesis that Netfix don't know what their doing, that is they are somehow missing out on growing or retaining their audience by cancelling shows after one or two seasons.

Obviously Netflix isn't going to act against their own interest, so they must believe the marginal cost of producing new seasons must be greater than the marginal revenue attributable to these new seasons.

What makes Netflix (and all streamers) different than the traditional networks is that their viewership data is orders of magnitude better. They know who watches, how quickly, where, when, which series are abandoned by viewers, which episodes are abandoned by viewers, how series X performed with people who binged series Y.

I imagine they aren't just saying that series X didn't have a big enough audience, they are figuring based on their machine learning models, series X could not build a large enough audience to justify the production costs.

That the art suffers for the bottom line, while tragic, is nothing new.