Many of the debt players are realizing their advantage over VC is lack of control over your company. For example, check out https://timiacapital.com/. A lot of their marketing is around "Retaining control" and "No warrants and no harsh covenants".
Equity funding to me should be used less for that and more for R&D and product development where the RoI is harder to calculate, or may not exist at all.
Put simply there's now a glut of money that is waiting to be invested via loans in anything that has a good ROI with low enough risks. In the past due to higher interest rates and various other factors (including regulatory) this glut of money just didn't exist before.
This seems to have been lost over the past 20+ years. I wouldn't even think about going to a bank with a smallish business for financing, you'd instantly think of equity funding instead. Hopefully this changes because debt really is more sensible for many startups.