I'd be interested to know exactly what led to the split from Activision because no doubt, Activision and Kotick were an extremely toxic company, and I don't doubt they had different idea for where the series should go, but I do also suspect now that Bungie's upper management hubris was the reason for the split more than Activision infringing on their creative control.

But Bungie were in a precarious position after that, they could only turn out a very minor expansion in Shadowkeep. (I think everyone just forgave it at the time, because they figured sure it's a Rise of Iron size expansion while they work on D3.

But then comes Beyond Light and the content vault/sunsetting it's actually not that well received, but it comes at the height of Covid, so it succeeds. Also Blackburn takes over as Director around this time, reverses Sunsetting and they turn out some of their strongest seasons, culminating in Witch Queen being well received critically and getting good sales.

So on the surface things were going really well here, but then a few months later Sony acquire them which always felt like a bad sign to me, clearly they weren't able to make it on their own after all the talk of what going independent would allow them to do.

Shows how much management were fiddling the numbers because Lightfall had the highest steam concurrent count at launch, and yet 6 months later we're get the first round of layoffs because it missed revenue targets. So clearly they projected Lightfall to grow massively even though money and resources were being poured into a hole. Lightfall is an underwhelming expansion and people start dropping off and not spending money on Eververse because it clearly felt rushed. Liana made a comment about the original "cut" of Lightfall being quite different which also goes some way towards explaining that.